this tweet made me so mad
not because it's a bad tweet i just get real mad thinking about wizards
they could straight up create a post-scarcity utopia for the whole world and instead they write by hand with fucking quills and use candles and keep slaves
they can do the jesus trick of taking food and then turning it into multiples of that same food!! they can summon (presumably clean) water! they can basically do perpetual motion machines!!
how are there even poor wizards???? why can't the weasleys just magic a bigger house
they could live more comfortably just by keeping those wizard tents in the yard
they made a society where everybody is supposed to work but most of them don't have anything to do which is why they all work in government
they don't even do capitalism very well. like, lupin has to specifically get the werewolf potion from snape because there aren't any other potion makers good enough to make it?? are you telling me slughorn has not fucking pharma bro'd that shit?
my dude is a one-man old boy's network and he doesn't actually use it for jack shit
in retrospect, methods of rationality really focused on some dumb shit
"ooOOOooOO why don't we do SCIENCE on MAGIC" i mean ok but why don't people use magic to make their lives better. what's with that
why do the weasleys have multiple chickens. you can multiply food if you already have it. you can make food you already have bigger. why not just have one chicken and just multiply its eggs
why is rita skeeter the only person with magical transcription technology
why are some things mass manufactured and not others. why do we have 0 idea how the mass manufactured things are made. is there a Scott Butterbeer somewhere and he makes all the butterbeer
if it's that easy to find a hidden place to make a magic potion that takes months and not get caught why don't some students make drugs or at least build a still
fred and george manage to make bank on candy that makes you sick to get out of class but no one is growing magic weed? come on
why don't people put Taboos on just random words as pranks
"you get a notification every time somebody says 'the' now good luck"
to be fair the "what if magic... but also... drunk" question is one of the primary questions answered by The Magicians, which is approximately 15,000 times worse than Harry Potter
you know how Greenhouse Three was locked and they could only go in there under teacher supervision? that shouldn't have been because the plants were dangerous. it should have been because teens kept trying to smoke them
they told us the forbidden forest was full of dangerous creatures but really it's off limit because everybody keeps trying to grow weed there
they have access to 3-headed dogs and they haven't bred them to be purse-sized for some reason
Dobby managed to steal Gillyweed from Snape's office because Hogwarts is full of the most painfully dull and uncreative teenagers ever to exist
otherwise every stash of potion ingredients in the entire damn castle would've been bolted shut and set with alarms
god they probably wouldn't even have to grow weed. they could just have one blunt and keep multiplying it. it would be practically impossible to stomp out, people could just keep making infinite joint copies
the wizards all get an education and work for the government when they could just make copies of whatever food they want and be high 24/7
all the bad wizards go evil in the same way and try to do a genocide instead of becoming weird perverts
like, how does it make sense that Snape works for Voldemort or switches sides or any of that shit instead of using his prodigious magical talents to attempt to create a living speaking Lily doll from a stolen lock of her hair to be his wife
this would have been a very creepy and bad subplot for a children's series to have, and also it was done on Buffy
but it still seems unrealistic to me that all the wizards grow up and work for the government instead of using their ability to live without particularly needing access to resources and become extremely weird obsessive hermits
the wizarding world just fuckin looks like a slightly wonky england and it should look, at the bare minimum, like Second Life
a thing that i found extremely realistic about The Culture series is that in a post-scarcity society with bio-modification technology available there is a guy who just grew as many dicks as possible. he's just covered in dicks
a thing that i found extremely realistic about Snow Crash is that there are people who walk around the metaverse as dicks. that's their avatar. they choose to present to the world as a six foot tall dong
a thing that i found extremely realistic about Ian McDonald's Luna series is that as soon as there were a bunch of laborers on the moon with trucks, they all worked together to draw a giant dick on the face of the moon with the truck tracks, and you can see it from Earth
Grindelwald managed to paint the triangle circle symbol thing on the wall at Durmstrang and no one is able to remove it and you're telling me that magic is available and people have access to it and the world isn't COVERED in dicks
you can make portraits that do nothing but scream racism all day and glue them to walls and they cannot be undone and there's only one of them? wizards have the call to evil that makes them keep trying to do holocausts but not create magic 4chan?
do not come @ me about how the magicians is actually good. it is probably the worst book ever written by a human
i have written about this before
also i basically did the same kind of harry potter thread in 2016 as i am doing now except instead of drugs i just did furry shit
.@NerdGarbageBot's concept basically came out of making fun of The Magicians
do you think other places have their own spells based on their local root languages
that is mostly unrelated to that tweet it just would be weird if chinese people were doing latin spells and not old-school chinese dialects or something
god if they can make flying brooms AND flying motorcycles why not just fuckin. make hoverchairs or whatever
hogwarts has staircases that move about on their own for no reason but no one has ever thought to install a fucking elevator
1. sit in chair
2. wingardium leviosa the chair
3. now you don't have to climb a ladder to get to trelawny's weird room
2. wingardium leviosa the chair
3. now you don't have to climb a ladder to get to trelawny's weird room
basically everything about magic would have been more entertaining without the "no tech at hogwarts" rule
and like. where the hell was the boundary for that. what was technical enough for hogwarts to break it
basically what i am asking is, why don't people try to do actual divination with magic 8-balls, it would be funny if they did that
whose idea was it to get terrifying beasts that were only visible once you saw someone die to pull the school carriages. you could just. make the carriages go. with magic
like i talk about the wizards being uncreative and that's why they don't do basic quality of life improvements but they do think to do that
"we need a way to get from the train (???) to the castle"
"well we have these magic boats"
"NO. WE WILL ONLY USE THOSE FOR NEW CHILDREN."
"okay well i guess we should go for the horrifying meat-horses that love the smell of blood then"
"right-o"
"well we have these magic boats"
"NO. WE WILL ONLY USE THOSE FOR NEW CHILDREN."
"okay well i guess we should go for the horrifying meat-horses that love the smell of blood then"
"right-o"
"we need lots of food, to feed the children"
"well we could have a cook make meals and then duplicate them a bunch of times"
"nah let's use slaves"
"well we could have a cook make meals and then duplicate them a bunch of times"
"nah let's use slaves"
a bunch of wizards MARRY MUGGLES and apparently TELL THOSE MUGGLES ABOUT THE MAGIC STUFF and somehow they haven't gotten roped into disease curing all their spouse's family members or whatever
god wizards are just the WORST
i assumed that skeeter chose to have it transcribe that way but: what if there were a bunch available that just wrote down the stuff you were doing in different tones
instead of Tabloid Journalist you can get a pen that writes in Novel With Fabio On The Cover or My Immortal or Slash Fanfiction etc
i have mostly grown out of harry potter now but i was obsessed with it as a kid (obviously), and it's pretty tainted by shit like jk rowling going to bat for a domestic abuser
it was a fun series of books though and as far as cultural touchstones go it's not *too* bad. i read a lot of YA and we could have, as a culture, done much, much worse
the only reason i can dunk on it like this is because i know it so well. if i'd been obsessed with star wars as a kid instead i could do the same sort of thread, the worldbuilding in those movies is just as haphazard and ridiculous
anyway, read the Culture series by Iain Banks. i recommend starting with Player of Games, it's the easiest introduction, and it's probably best read either right after or right before Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed
both are books about people from utopian societies interacting with outsiders with wildly different approaches and results
the Culture series is about a post-scarcity world where people actually *do* use their basically unlimited resources to do stuff like grow a hundred dicks and try to set a record for how many people can be fucking at the same time
you can read other Culture books too, they don't have a particular order. Consider Phlebas sucks, though, skip it.
if you find people rules lawyering their way around magical systems and trying to break the world in fun and entertaining ways, as in this thread, i recommend becoming a dungeon master
if you like the idea of not being an inefficient bunch of jerks who hoard resources and force people to have jobs for no apparent reasons, i recommend becoming a communist, socialist or anarchist. all of them have their merits
please do not try to nitpick my harry potter jokes. they are jokes. also, i probably know more about harry potter world than you do, which is in no way a particularly good use of the brain god gave me but there you are
instead, go read another book. there are a lot of fun books! some books i've read lately and liked include Hunger Makes The Wolf, Noumenon, Tess of the Road, Winter Tide, Too Like The Lightning, Serpentine, The Fifth Season, Autonomous and Sourdough
in conclusion, fuck the police
