embarrassment squick?

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

archangelofthestars:

New Star Trek headcanon just dropped: Geordi and data regularly hang out in the dark and Geordi sometimes forgets that people need light to see

 

archangelofthestars:

3122f052507da712a6e552ba8ef8c04a89c7b7a6

This is so incredibly important how dare you hide this in the tags /lh

 

datafucker420:

Pov you walk into a pitch black room and you see two creepy glowing android eyes, two flashing red lights, and the fucked up thing cats’ eyes do in the dark

 

cheeseanonioncrisps:

Further hc that Data can’t actually see in the dark either.

He’s just never thought to mention this because he has a photographic memory and direct neural access to all of the Enterprise’s schematics, and therefore doesn’t actually need sight to know where everything is.

 

archangelofthestars:

32d125c63fd38fd13e8928fce49f7064f108eb2d

okay no cause like i love this.

 

unicorn-and-bluebells:

YES

 

telanana:

Ok but imagine the Enterprise goes to help people on this planet where everyone lives underground in the dark because of radiation or something. Like it’s bad enough that hundreds of generations have lived underground and, over the course of time, have adapted to the darkness so well that light sources actually hurt them. So Picard has to figure out how to help them without sending people in with lights.

And the obvious answer is to send Geordi down, but the settlements are so far down the communicators cut out and Picard isn’t sending anyone into that alone.

“Data and I should be able to handle it,” Geordi says. “Neither of us need light to see and Engineering can manage fine without us for a few hours.”

Picard nods and is on the verge of sanctioning the mission with his trademark, “Make it so,” when Data speaks up.

“Actually, my visual sensors are designed to be as much like the human eye as possible,” he says. “They only process information transmitted by the reflection of light off physical surfaces. My ability to function onboard Enterprise in unlit spaces is due to my memorization of both the ship’s schematics and the design preferences of those whose quarters I visit regularly.”

Behind his visor, unbeknownst to the rest of the crew, Geordi blinks as he tries to process this new information. He’s almost about to apologize to Picard and Data for the assumption when Data continues.

“However, I would be able to integrate the information from our tricorder scans to navigate without much difficulty. I could accompany Geordi to the settlement and provide some level of assistance.”

Picard looks a bit confused at the correction, but nods. “Make it so.”

Later, when they’ve beamed down into the caverns, Geordi asks why Data never mentioned that he couldn’t actually see in the dark. He would’ve turned the lights on if he’d known.

“I did not need it,” Data answers simply, as if that was explanation enough.

“Data, most people like the lights to be on, even if they don’t need it,” Geordi points out. “It’s a comfort thing. And polite, too, I guess.”

Data pauses, processing. “I was not uncomfortable, nor did I find the lack of light to be rude. I enjoy our conversations in the dark.”

“Huh.” Geordi stops, watching as Data continues down the tunnel a bit further. “But you keep your quarters dark sometimes, too.”

“Spot is nocturnal,” Data explains. “I have read that it is important for cats to maintain a sense of routine, including a regular day and night cycle.”

“You do your work in the dark for Spot?”

“For my friends.”

 

cheeseanonioncrisps:

Oh god this is adorable! I love it!

Tags:

#Star Trek #TNG #headcanons #adorable #embarrassment squick?

The Perfect Wish

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

sinesalvatorem:

It was official. I was going to die.

Not in the normal way that everyone can sense their creeping mortality over their shoulder. I hadn’t really had that problem since I was eleven and learned about freezing brains. After that, I’d always expected to grow up, get old, end up with a popsicle head, and revive after a few years or decades. Sure, the precursor to The World’s Worst Brain-Freeze was going to suck, but it’d all be worth it when I got to stick it to the Post Modernists. Oblivion my ass.

That was until last year. Last year I was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. Don’t get me wrong, all cancer is shit, but I’m pretty sure my variety was a special kind of shit. This was the shit you had when you ate week-old Mexican food at a run-down gas station. It was a work of art.

I still thought I could make it, though. I could rely on the medical tradition that had killed smallpox, beaten up measles, and was currently shaking down malaria for its lunch money. With that kind of muscle at my back, who was seriously going to try messing with me?

Well, as it happens, cancer cells are human too – and humans fight dirty. Pretty much any poison that can kill a cancer cell will also kill your non-treasonous cells too. Modern Medicine had rid the world of the Devil’s Kiss but was often outmanoeuvred by the Emperor of all Maladies. I was learning first-hand why armies just shot traitors as soon as they found them. My personal fifth column was cutting off my oxygen supply-lines and winter was coming. I was breathing purified oxygen through a straw and I still felt like I was drowning.

However, that wasn’t when I realised I was going to die. You see, I still had hope that I could save the game and respawn later. There had to eventually come a time when we knew how to kill the Emperor and blow up the Death Star. I just had to bide my time in a cooler. No, what sealed my fate was when my parents found Religion™.

It wouldn’t have been too bad if my parents had just found religion. They’d never been the type to go to church, but it would have been of no consequence to me if they’d started. Unfortunately, when normal medical treatment failed to do more than postpone the inevitable, they turned to Religion™ to solve the problem. Starting with faith healings and making the gradual, winding journey that led to crystals, homeopathy, and “Ancient Chinese Medicine”.

The last of these was annoying for the same reason that names like “the Holy Roman Empire” are annoying. After all, Ancient Chinese Medicine wasn’t ancient, it certainly wasn’t medicine, and it wasn’t even all that Chinese. It was what Mao’s government had started peddling to make people think their Communist Paradise had world-class medicine in the interim while they tried to import real doctors. Did this matter to the people making money off of desperation? Not one bit.

The end result was that, last week Tuesday, I learned that I was going to die. For good. It turns out that, while talk is cheap, woo is expensive. That was the day my folks told me that there was almost no money left in any of their accounts. My parents had used up almost all their money chasing the ancient Chinese dragon, and now they didn’t have much in the budget for anything else. Like, say, cryonics. By then I had two months to live and, when I died, my brain would be warm. I’d join the billions of others who had rotted in the ground before me. Needless to say, I was not pleased.

I was 16 and had no money to freeze myself with. What little money I’d managed to earn and save for myself had been “repurposed” for the greater good of rubbing some shiny rocks on my back. The money I had been able to accumulate probably wouldn’t have been sufficient to freeze myself with anyway, but it still pissed me off that my guardians were allowed to just take away what I had and use it on obvious bullshit. If cancer had been polite enough to wait a few years I wouldn’t be in this mess because I’d have had a job and my parents wouldn’t be empowered to piss away my property. Why couldn’t they have been sensible, like me, and believed in the coming of the Robot Gods, planet-sized computers, pollen-sized factories, and the Great Paperclip Seas?

I’d been stewing in existential angst for the past six days when they arrived. The poster children for prioritising warm fuzzies over actual results. The people that we world-weary grownups knew better than to give money to when there were better ways to donate it. Like, for example, literally throwing wads of cash at poor people. They were here now – right out in the hospital’s hallway.

My mother opened the door and let a man and a woman, both dressed in fancy formal clothes that were worth over a hundred malaria nets, enter my room.

“These nice people are from the Make A Wish Foundation,” my mother said excitedly. She was all smiles for the first time in over a week. I couldn’t help but notice the way they were introduced. Anyone fluent in Parentese knows that “nice people” is a sign of one of three things:

1) You’re three years old.

2) They’re goddamn liars and these people want to rip out your kidneys and eat them. (I learned this the first time I was introduced to a police officer. In my defence, banning painkillers in schools is 130% ridiculous, and distributing them to my classmates doesn’t make me a drug dealer by any sane definition.)

3) You’re dying and your parents seem to think that, if they don’t condescend to you enough, they’ll somehow make your imminent demise worse.

The woman with the ridiculously expensive shoes walked over to the side of my bed and sat in a chair. “We want to know what you’d wish for if you could have anything in the world, sweetie.” I supressed a cringe at “sweetie”. I knew I was a bit small for my age – genetics and cancer did a number on me – but I certainly didn’t look like a three year old. Instead, I contemplated her question. The first idea that came to mind was “I wish for you to pre-commit to saving the lives of any drowning children you may come across in the future, even if it means ruining your hyper-expensive shoes.” Needless to say, I kept thinking.

“I type… faster than… I can speak.” I told them. Lung cancer has been known to impede communication. “Laptop?” I asked pointing at the laptop my parents kept on the nightstand next to my bed. My mother brought it over to me, and I began communicating the way people should. Speaking out loud was so last century.

>Attempt #1 – I wish to not die.

I turned the laptop around to face Expensive Shoes Woman and watched her face go through a variety of interesting transformations as she read and, presumably, reread my request.

“I’m sorry, baby.” She cooed. “We don’t actually know how to do that… But I would if I could, of course.”

Seriously, were these people that bad at estimating age by sight? I was tempted to show them an online profile that prominently displayed my age, but my mother would tell me to stop being passive aggressive to people who only meant well. I bore it and typed a response.

>I didn’t actually expect you to, of course. If all the medicine I’ve ever heard of couldn’t manage it, I wouldn’t expect a non-medical charity to succeed. I asked because checking whether a wish-granting entity is literally magical is some pretty low-hanging fruit and, if you guys actually were genies, and I died because I didn’t bother checking, I’m not sure which would be worse – my death or my embarrassment.

This time Expensive Shoes Woman was reading over my shoulder as I typed and, while this is rude, it didn’t really bother me because I was trying to communicate with her, after all. I eventually regretted letting her do this because, I later learned, her facial expressions as she read this were even more interesting than the last set.

>Attempt #2 – I wish to die before the cancer has a chance to reach my brain (assuming it ever metastasises that far) and, upon my death, I wish to be cryonically preserved. I don’t think these should be counted as separate wishes since the first is merely intended to facilitate the second. I wouldn’t want to carry a brain tumour with me into the future. Hopefully, nature takes care of that by itself so don’t worry about it too much for now.

Expensive Shoes Woman abruptly stood up and said, “James, I think you may want to see this,” waving at my laptop. James of the Fancy Suit walked over to the side of my bed and looked at the laptop’s screen. This time I could see the facial expression. It looked like the gas station’s week-old Mexican food was kicking in.

“First off,” he told me firmly, “we do not kill children.” I wondered if, by Gricean Implicature, he meant to say, “We only kill adults”.

“Secondly,” he continued, “I’ve never heard of ‘cryonics’ so I don’t know if I can give it to you. I’ll have to speak to the higher-ups. This isn’t a standard thing like Disney World or meeting Justin Bieber. Are you sure you wouldn’t want one of those?” I was pretty sure I preferred living long enough to get up-close and personal with Saturn’s rings over seeing a bored employee in a silly suit tell kids he was “the real Mickey Mouse”. I told them as much, and also made sure to explain what cryonics was.

“Well, I’m sorry, honey,” the Expensive Shoes Woman said, “but I don’t think that that’s something we do, right James?”

“No, Sarah, I’m pretty sure it’s not.” James replied. He watched me intently, as if trying to estimate how likely it was that I was completely insane.

“Is there anything else we might be able to do for you?” Sarah asked me. “Maybe not Disney World, but there are tons of thing we can do. We make kids happy all the time and I’m sure we could do the same for you.”

I wasn’t happy, though. I was angry. I’d actually been hopeful about getting my head frozen and now hope was dashed yet again. I was even angrier at the various Alternative ‘Medicine’ practitioners who’d done all manner of nonsense to me. Not only had they swindled my parents’ money, but they’d given them hope and taken it away so many times. Now I knew what that felt like. Now I just wanted a way to express all the anger.

>Attempt #3 – Is there any way I can cash in my wish for some symbolic gesture that would qualify as a great big “fuck you” to death itself? Like, basically, a gigantic middle-finger?

“We are not building a child a derogatory statue!” James declared, clearly appalled at the notion.

>I didn’t mean that literally. I want to order a metaphorical middle-finger. Any ideas?

“None that I can think of, I’m afraid.” James said, still watching me warily. “Where kids these days even get the notion…”

I slumped in on myself. It was clear to all present that this visit had not been particularly enjoyable to me.

“Look, why don’t you sleep on it?” Sarah asked me. “We’ll come back tomorrow to see if you’ve thought of any, um, grand gestures. We’ll see what we can do, alright?”

I nodded a little glumly. Yeah, I’d think. I never give up on a problem without thinking about it for at least five minutes. I’d be ready by tomorrow.

The next day, the same pair came back to my hospital room. However, this time, I was ready.

“Do you have an idea for a wish this time, darling?” Sarah asked me with a bright smile. She clearly intended to provide enough happiness for both of us. I wondered if she called everyone “sweetie” and “darling” and if the others found it as off-putting as I did. Regardless, I had an answer to her question.

>Yes, I do. First, I have a question of my own: what’s your budget for a wish?

Sarah stared blankly at the screen and then at me. “What?” She asked. “You shouldn’t be asking those questions! We handle the financial side of things. Don’t worry about that stuff.”

>Good thing I didn’t count on you being helpful there and did my own research. According to your website, as of March 2012, the average you spent on a single wish was $7,500. I don’t know how much that’s changed but I think it’s safe to assume that $10,000 is within your price range.

James looked at me sceptically. “What do you want that costs $10,000?”

>Your website lists, among the potential wish categories, “I wish to give”. Well, I wish to give $10,000 to the Against Malaria Foundation. That’s my big “fuck you” to death itself.

Sarah bit her lip. “Um, I don’t know exactly what the ‘Against Malaria Foundation’ is, but it sounds like a charity and we don’t donate money to other charities.* After all, we’re a charity, and if our donors wanted to support the Against Malaria Foundation, they would have sent their checks there instead. It was their decision.”

>Yeah, but the point of the Make A Wish Foundation is to use the power of middle class disposable income to make a couple kids who are about to die happy. I’m a kid, I’m about to die, and the thing that would make me happy is for some other kids to not die. I’m already a lost cause but if, in the process of biting it, I save three more lives, that’s sort of worth it, right? Don’t get me wrong – I don’t like dying – but I don’t think the kids in Malawi do either.

At this point Sarah was tearing up a little and had to wipe at her eyes. “You’re really strong, you know?” I rolled my eyes. I knew it wasn’t a nice thing to do, but I was freaking dying. Being strong was immaterial at this point.

Sarah got up from the chair by the side of my bed. “I’ll see what I can do, OK? I’ll talk to some people. They might be willing to bend the policy – but no promises yet.” I was careful to restrain my enthusiasm as they left the room. I didn’t want my hopes rising up and crashing down again. Chances were nothing would come of it. Getting around established policy was an uphill battle and I shouldn’t expect too much from them.

On Friday my mother handed me a local newspaper while grinning from ear to ear. She told me to turn to page four and I did so, feeling a bit confused. That was when I saw it. The article was entitled: “Feisty Young Cancer Survivor Uses Her Wish To Save Lives”. I was too elated to even complain about them calling a kid with two months to live a “survivor”. I read through the article and learned all about how the people at the local chapter of the Make A Wish Foundation had been so moved when they heard about my self-sacrifice – y’know, the usual bull.

It turns out they put up a notice online about how much a certain cancer “survivor” cared about the global poor and asked others to contribute to making her dream come true. Over a hundred people pitched in and the original $10,000 had become $24,000. I’d never expected so much. I hadn’t cried that much since the day I was first diagnosed with cancer. However, through all the jubilation, I couldn’t get one question out of my mind:

Did they seriously just call me ‘feisty’!?

                                                            fin

*I don’t actually know if giving to other charities is against the MaWF’s policies, but this wouldn’t surprise me.

If you want to support the Make A Wish Foundation, click here.

If you want to support the Against Malaria Foundation, click here.

If you want to know why the latter is a better choice than the former, click here.

Tags:

#that one post with the thing #storytime #effective altruism #cancer cw #death tw #like really strong warnings here‚ be careful #abuse cw? #illness tw? #embarrassment squick? #I think about this post every time I come across a personal-finance blogger #(or‚ occasionally‚ a personal-finance academic-article-writer) #talking about ~dying with zero~ #dying without having spent all of your retirement fund is not a worse outcome than dying *with* having spent it all! #why the fuck would I want to ride the knife’s edge of broke-ness? #and why the *fuck* would I want to make *Plan As* that *depend on my death*? #Plan A is immortality #Plan B is that if the Grim Reaper wants me‚ he’s gonna have to give up as many plague deaths as I can negotiate for in exchange #adventures in human capitalism

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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sigmaleph:

sigmaleph:

sigmaleph:

anyway, fantasy universe where reincarnation is real but you keep absolutely none of the memories of your past lives and the only relevance is that your magical power is directly proportional to how old your soul is

secret cabals of wizards fighting over population growth because of their ideological commitments to particular distributions of magical power

“Do you know of Praidib’s law, Firem?” She was standing, talking, as if there was nothing more interesting going in the world

“Praidib…? What does that have to do with anything?!”

“A soul does not grow in power when not in a living body. It was quite ingenious, how Praidib proved it. I’m sure your classes at the university would have covered it eventually”

“If you hadn’t murdered them all? Yeah, maybe I’d have a more complete education.” I had nothing better to do than engage her, I suppose. I could not escape my bindings. “What’s your fucking point, Hillah?”

“Think of the consequences, Firem. The archmage’s soul is ten thousand years old. After the population explosion of the Blue Renaissance, two-thirds of the people in this world have souls less than a hundred years old. Less than one percent of the power that will be wielded by whichever lucky child happens to inherit that soul. And as long as that soul is embodied, it will continue to accumulate power and have a ten thousand year head start on the vast majority of the world. You have seen what people with power do to those without”

“His power certainly didn’t stop you from killing him”

“Nobody should have that kind of power, my dear. Not me, and not him, and not you. But how do you stop it? How do you even begin to slow down a soul’s accumulation of power? Why, Praidib’s law, of course.”

“So you think you’ve solved soulcaging? Is that your big plan?”

“No, of course not. Soulcaging is impossible. If you want a soul unhoused… you deny it a body. There’s a billion souls in the world today. Soon, there won’t be a billion bodies to house them. Or a hundred million. Or even twenty million. I’ve run the numbers. I know how long it took civilization to build up to its current numbers. I have given us time to catch up”

Twenty million. That was what she was planning? That was what her weapon would do? Wipe out hundreds of millions of lives? I could not say anything

“The vast majority of the souls embodied will be, why, the vast majority,” she continued, seeing my lack of reply “The children of the renaissance, with less than a century’s worth of power to them. But they can even out. They can age. The problem will not be solved, not entirely, but…”

“But nothing! In another millennium, those souls will be lucky to have aged another century, and the archmage’s soul will still be ten thousand years old! And every body it has, it will still be an unmatched wizard. You’ve accomplished nothing except mass murder.”

“I told, you dear, I run the numbers. I am well aware. There will still be some great mages being born… but we need not let them live.”

“You… fuck. That device you used earlier. You can track souls by age.”

“Indeed,” she smiled. “I can, and so can my disciples. When our dearest archmage pops up again, he or she will be lucky to make it six months. My organisation will rebuild the world, and for as long as they exist, we will be on even footing. Not me, of course. This is my last life for a while now. But humanity. And when we fail, because we will fail eventually, at least we’d have made the odds closer. I don’t know how many tens of thousands of years it will take, but… best start now”

And saying so, she threw her hands to the sky, and called upon death.

“No, sorry, OK, this just doesn’t make sense”

“Does it really? Or are you just refusing to-”

“No, it really doesn’t. Like, this is not an ethical argument against mass murder, we can hash that out later, just… I can see why you’d want a population below the number of souls, sure. You want a certain number of souls not incarnated and gaining power, and you think you can bias which souls that is with constant selective murder. What makes no sense is dropping the population to, what, two hundredths of the historical maximum? less? The rate at which total human magical power accumulates is proportional to population. If you want new souls catching up to old ones, you want them gaining more power over time, not less. That means a population slightly under a billion, but not much smaller”

“I…what?” She started rifling through some papers in a nearby desk. “I could swear… crap crap crap.”

“Are you sure you didn’t mean you actually wanted to kill twenty million people, rather than leave twenty million survivors?”

“Shut up. Maybe. Look, I outsourced this to Satrean, his notes weren’t super clear, I might’ve… shit.”

“Gods fucking above, Hillah, did it not come up at any point how many people you were going to kill?”

“Oh, I’m sorry, have you ever run a secretive organisation of assassins that’s trying to upend the world order? You compartmentalise information! You don’t have an all-hands meeting every Fireday to talk about your doomsday plans!”

“Well, I apologise for implying you should put your ability to figure out what actually are your goals and how you achieve them above your cloak and dagger roleplaying. I’m sure it’d ruin your fun to double-check.”

“Shit, shit, shit… look, yeah, OK, it makes more sense the other way, you’re right. Do you mind staying tied up to that chair a couple hours more, I need to recalibrate this whole thing”

“Are you going to let me go if I say I do mind?”

“No”

“Worth a try. Anyway, going back to that argument we tabled about the ethics of mass murder…”

Tags:

#reincarnation #storytime #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #fun with statistics #fun with loopholes #death tw #amnesia cw #murder cw

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

56e12a26418c061a10b12ab6e7cd7134bd701542

poipoipoi-2016:

https://www.yankeecandle.com/product/warm-and-cozy/_/R-1667510 – Example

Friends don’t let friends give their entire extended families COVID.

Tags:

#AAAAAAAAAAAAAA #today in We Live in a Horror Movie: the ”the call is coming from inside the house” edition #(personally I am *not* a clueless horror-movie protagonist and I have been keeping an eye (so to speak) on my sense of smell) #(when I was in quarantine I kept a bottle of peppermint oil on my bedside table) #(and opened it once or twice a day to check if my nose was still working) #((it was)) #(also remember that that’s for times when you’re *not* wearing a mask) #(if you’re currently wearing a mask having a sense of smell that’s *too good* is the bad sign because it means problems with your mask seal) #(if you’re wearing an N95 the correct level of sense-of-smell to have *is* in fact *zero*) #(for a surgical-shaped mask you should get occasional whiffs of stuff but little or no background scents) #(that includes cloth‚ though the occasional whiffs will likely be somewhat more frequent than they are with a well-made #–(not churned-out-for-2020 shit)– #disposable) #((yes‚ you can smell that surgical masks aren’t as good as N95s; yes‚ it’s scary)) #tag rambles #illness tw #covid19 #Yankee Candle #embarrassment squick?

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Finally, A Personality Quiz Backed By Science

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{previous post in sequence}}

{{Title link: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/personality-quiz/?group=-MLnw84-zDddzbQsP6ta }}

brin-bellway:

rustingbridges:

voxette-vk:

TIL 538 has a personality test

Follow the link above to be in the “group” I made so that you can compare your score against the average. (Hopefully. It seems not to want to load the results when I refresh the page…)

c7f813ba153e5b17bb4cf97bd1a2bcff06a6571a

we’re doin big 5 I guess:

9687af0eccb13aa6f1d4cd1764ad61a4ca562d69
30ccfc5eb49856a1b965b3797179e9514352f62e

My first thought was that it was attempting to tell me what I want to hear: most of these are rather “better” figures than I was getting on Open Psychometrics a couple years back.

Then I looked at the more detailed breakdown, and a lot of my supposed middle-of-the-road-ness is from having very high scores in some subcategories and very low scores in others, which “averages out” when seen at lower resolutions. Are you very anxious but not depressed? Congratulations, your negative emotionality is “moderate”.

(Except conscientiousness, which is a nice symmetric equilateral triangle with every vertex at ~75.)

((…wait, how does the *average* American have *75th* percentile conscientiousness))

This version seems to place somewhat more emphasis on *treating* people well when it comes to agreeableness, as opposed to Open Psychometrics’ questions which were pretty much purely about how you felt about them on the inside, and that difference is most of what dragged me from 12 up to 38. I am a proverbial kitten who thinks of nothing but murder.

—

“You might also have a low opinion of your own looks.” I look plain in a vaguely pleasant manner, which is *exactly how I like it*, thank you very much

“Some scientists think low extraversion has protected humans from disease — you can’t pick up a bug from people if you avoid people.” saaame

@voxette-vk​ replied: “These aren’t percentile scores”

 

Hmm, I suppose I read too much into this bit:

“A lot of the outcomes that correlate with low agreeableness, like being chronically bullied (or bullying) or having a criminal record, don’t kick in until someone’s score is down in the 10th percentile.”

I guess that makes the two sets of numbers not directly comparable, then.

—

I just went and took the Open Psychometrics one again to see how they portray their results, and it looks like this:

c31f342c50cfecbaa18afb1f16b267ce561ef5c3

And yeah, you can really see the difference grading on a curve makes, huh. Like, if you hear “your score is 7 out of 100″ you would not intuitively expect so much of the agreeableness bar to be filled, but I guess their other test-takers are so agreeable that moderately low agreeableness is enough to make you way below average.

Tags:

#is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #memes #surveys #anger management #replies

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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gallusrostromegalus:

kyraneko:

gallusrostromegalus:

miswrit:

Not nearly enough “Sirius Black makes himself at home in Privet Drive because there’s nothing the Dursleys can do to get him to leave” fic out there, and it’s a crying shame.

Harry just rolling up like WHADDUP THIS IS MY EMOTIONAL SUPPORT FAMILAR HE EMOTIONALLY SUPPORTS ME BY MAULING PEOPLE WHO THREATEN ME.  And Sirus dog-charades AND THIS IS MY EMOTIONAL SUPPORT COUCH YOU CAN SIT ON THE FLOOR FUCKERS.

You know what else is good “Dudley gets on top of how fucked up his parents are faster” fic, and i feel like “Sirius Lives at Privet Drive” dovetails nicely into this:

  • Dudley, age 14 and realizing his mother’s Loving-but-Ill-advised cooking is setting him up for some serious health problems, and that he’s tall enough to look his dad in the eye now, so his previous rationale of “If he’s hitting Harry he’s not Hitting Me” doesn’t hold up now, and goes full Eye of The Tiger to cope.
  • This means Sirus gets dragged along on a lot of Parent-avoiding “Walkies”
  • So many that one evening after a fight Dudley is trying to round up Harry and Sirius for a cooldown run and Sirius groans “Oh you’re big lads you can jog to the tesco on your own.” from the couch
    There’s a hot moment of silence.
  • “He’s a Magic Dog.” Says Harry.
  • “What do you mean your dog is a 40-year-old man?”
    “What do you mean your Dad’s BFF?”
    “What do you mean convicted criminal?”
    What do you mean WIZARD HITLER WANTS YOUR HIDE??”
    “..Shit I gotta up my workout routine.”

    “You’re not gonna punch Voldermort out Dudley.”

    “Not with these wimpy biceps I won’t.”
  • Shit’s getting increasingly tense in the house so when Ron announces they have tickets to the Quidditch World Cup Harry has to ask “Hey, can Dudley come too?”
  • Dudley might be short on wizarding skills but one thing he’s learned at Fancy rich boy School is the art of Schmooze.  They meet Corneilus Fudge and Dudley charms the hell out of him. Fudge doesn’t even realize he’s not a Wizard.   Harry tries to impress upon him the ‘VOLDERMORT’S ALIVE WITH A CULT DIPSHIT” upon him and nearly ends up in tears before Dudley takes his arm and whispers “Let me Handle This.”
  • Thirty minutes later Corneilus is organizing a Task Force of Aurors. 
  • “What the fuck do they teach you there?” asks Harry.
    “Oh, buttering egos, Trigonometry, grift, the usual.”
    “What’s Trigonometry?” Asks Ron, walking with them on a field trip through Muggle London for Nandos.  Dudley’s Uncle “Gerald White” is supervising them it’s fine.
    Dudley stares for a moment.
    “You guys… are learning math, along with your Divination and Transmorfigication and whatsits, right?”
    There is an awkward silence. Even Sirius considers morphing back into a dog to avoid this conversation.
    “Oh for fucks sake.” Sighs Dudley, texting Hermionie to see if she brought her Muggle textbooks along.
  • (She Did)
  • IDK what happens when the school year starts but I love the idea of “Well some snitch (Snape) might notice if Sirus is hanging around, so instead he goes with Dudley to Fancy Rich Boy School.  Maybe they’re short a teacher there and he can reccomend his friend Remus, currently out of work for reasons that aren’t his fault…

Yassss!

  • “What’s trigonometry?” some pureblood at the World Cup asks him. “It’s a variant of arithmancy,” says Harry, who’s become somewhat adept at bullshitting translations between magical and muggle things when the incentive was avoiding Aunt Marge’s wrath.
  • Nobody’s ever heard of trigonometry except for one elderly pureblood witch, who had heard it mentioned once back in school by a classmate who went on to become a famous name in advanced and extremely theoretical arithmancy.
  • Everybody loses no time in agreeing that trigonometry must be this tremendously advanced arithmancy specialization and Dudley Dursley must be an absolute arithmancy prodigy to the point where even the arithmancy buffs don’t want to risk making themselves look stupid by asking him about his research.
  • OBVIOUSLY Dudley goes to some extremely foreign wizarding school with an advanced research program available. There can’t be many of them with an advanced “trigonometry” program like that, so nobody asks which school it is because what if there’s only one of them and they look stupid for not knowing about it?
  • Besides, Harry Potter, the Boy Who Lived, is giving him the time of day like he’s someone really important, so, yeah.
  • Oh, yeah, he’s definitely the type of absent-minded brilliance that forgets his wand regularly, head in the clouds with all those theorems.
  • Dudley actually takes up computer programming at Smeltings. He tried it out because he likes video games, and then sort of fell in love with the process, the building something up out of lines of code, the thrill of success when it works. The awestruck reactions of wizards who see a couple of his notebooks when he sits there scribbling out code on a spiralbound notebook with a ballpoint pen is almost tangible.
  • The ballpoints and the notebooks take some suspicion for their muggleness until Harry points out that you don’t need to pay attention to how much ink is left and when you need to dip it, so it’s perfect for somebody who might want to scribble out whole pages of that stuff without noticing whether they’ve run out of ink, and the notebooks have pages so you could remember where something is. Pretty soon quill-tipped ballpoints are all the rage and spiralbound parchment stacks are being sold in all the stores.
  • Somebody asks Dudley about his family history. “Oh, they’ve all been like me,” he says, “as far back as anybody remembers” and he means not-a-wizard, but everybody thinks the opposite.
  • His father is blustery and yells and prone to explosive bursts of anger, he says, and his mother is obsessed with cleanliness and etiquette, and everyone is perfectly happy to never suggest they’d like to meet them.
  • Once Dudley figures out that everyone thinks he’s a wizard, he and Harry have a solid laugh over it and Harry teaches Dudley what he’d need to know to continue the deception. Fred and George are brought into the equation and provide him with lots of cool tricks and such so that he can appear to do some small bits of magic now and again.
  • He eventually marries Daphne Greengrass, who knows about his muggleness at that point and loves the idea of getting one over on her overly bloodpurist parents without them ever knowing about it. Harry and Sirius quietly gift them Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place, and the assumption that Dudley has the sort of money that buys a historic Pureblood property as a starter home goes round and round.
  • Dudley ends up on the Board of Governors, and later Minister for Magic, and in their old age Petunia and Vernon suffer the mingled pride and fury that their son is a Government Minister and they can’t brag about it.

Two other AUs this goes well with:

  • “all the pureblood dipshits tithed thier land and holdings to Voldemort so when Harry kills him, all the assets go to him and now he owns half of wizarding UK.”
  • “early on his career as a wizard, Dudley goes to Wales to meet another Famed Arithmancer and becomes close friends with fellow videogame and rugby enthusiast Howell Jenkins.”

Tags:

#Harry Potter #fanfic #story ideas I will never write #abuse cw? #embarrassment squick? #oh look an update