#infinitely worse for visibility but extremely funny

[dogwoodbite]

hate hate hate the continued replacement of sodium-vapor streetlights with horrible blinding white LED's. we need to do something drastic

[thephoenix-hq]

☞ NAME: Lily Evans. ☞ AGE: Nineteen (01.30.1960). ☞ BLOOD STATUS: Muggleborn. ☞ HOUSE: Former Gryffindor. ☞ GENDER: Cis-Female. ☞ FACECLAIM: Katherine McNamara.

+ THE STORY SO FAR +

Love is a funny little thing. For the majority of Lily Evans’ young life, she felt as though she had love completely figured out. Her mother and father loved each other desperately. Their feelings for one another were so consuming, their children often felt as though there wasn’t any left over to spare for them. So Lily took the responsibility of loving Petunia Evans in the ways their parents could not. She didn’t mind that her gentle kindness was met with jealous hostility. And when she met Severus Snape, it was much the same process. She knew that love wasn’t simple or easy or kind. Her experience of it, and what led her to believe in it the way she did, was gray, bleak, and painful. Lily thought loving someone meant you needed them, couldn’t breathe without them. Neither Petunia nor Severus seemed to be able to properly function without her, so they must love her deeply.

And then they both broke her heart. Petunia cut her off in her fifth year. She went off to college and met an incriminatory boring man who clearly didn’t love her, but found use in her. Severus found cronies that liked to play with dark magic and hated her. He chose them in the end, and Lily chose herself. It wasn’t until halfway through her sixth year that she discovered she might have a defunct view of love. She watched the people around her show it in various ways, none of them as painful as her experience had been - though some extremely close and no less dumbfounding. The way the Marauder’s loved each other was fierce and loyal. They way each one of them loved other people in their lives was varying. Sirius with sarcastic skepticism. Peter with veiled admiration. Remus with fear. Marlene with uncertainty. Mary with open admiration and sweetness.

James Potter, someone Lily had always seen as a nuisance, with unwavering trust and unconditional loyalty. James Potter didn’t need anyone. He already had his every desire handed to him. The people he chose to keep around were those he wanted by his side. Yet, he treated them as if they were all individually viable and loved. It baffled Lily. And when he turned that love on her, it was a fire she never knew she had been missing out on. He taught her how to love and be loved for real and though it ruined her, in it she found a gratitude that would last a lifetime.

- J U N E 1 9 7 9 -

Lily had been in South Africa when the familiar face of her old professor appeared, likely out of thin air, in the small seaside village of Kalk Bay near the Cape of Good Hope. For months, she had been traveling, searching for nothing but culture and the opportunity to continue learning. Wizarding villages around the world were fascinating and if Dumbledore hadn’t informed her of the state of things back home, she may not have ever stopped going. She had a duty to her country, herself, and people like her to tend to. “I’ll be there,” she told him, a familiar defiance known to her returning as if it had never left.

← C O N N E C T I O N S →

← James Potter

In a way, he showed her how to love herself the way she deserved. He had given her a beautiful year and a half. In that time, she discovered things she hadn’t known could be possible; about herself, about love, about the boy who had very quickly become a man before her eyes. When they graduated, they fell blissfully into something domestic. She would paint or read or study, and he would fly, train, each of them doing any number of things to fill the day. Neither wanted to work for the ministry and he had plenty of money to get by on doing his own thing through the days. She worked at a bookstore to stay busy but very quickly, Lily grew restless. She had been preparing to tell him. James, I want to run away. At the time, it hadn’t meant anything more than that. She craved new horizons and colorful places. She couldn’t grow old in the same spot her entire life. She wasn’t a girl who was made for ordinary things. They could go places, see and do incredible things - together. But then he proposed the very second she had been prepping to spill her hearts desires to him, and her answer was swift. She hadn’t even thought it through the way she would’ve liked to. “No.” She gasped, surprising herself. “I’m so sorry.” There had been sudden and unsuppressed tears streaming down her cheeks as she took one of his hands and pressed a kiss to his knuckles. He look dumbfounded, unable to move and Lily felt her heart break for the third time in her life in an incredibly different way than before. This one was so much worse than the others. This one was her own fault. She apparated then, back to his house and hurriedly packed up all of her belongings. She would be gone before he would return, a note in her absence with another lame apology upon it. She needed to explain everything to him, but somehow she couldn’t. So instead, she traveled. She pushed the hurt deep down into her stomach and shoved herself fully into her travels. She knows he will be there. He cares too much not to be, and if Lily weren’t equally as passionate, she might have turned Dumbledore down. She couldn’t, though. This was bigger than the both of them. Nevertheless, she fears seeing him again after so long with zero contact.

→ Marlene McKinnon

In their sixth year, Lily took notice of a budding friendship between Remus Lupin and Marlene McKinnon. She was taken back to a time in their first and second years when Marlene had been a common face around Severus. Lily and Marlene were similar in their mindsets; both ambitious and stubborn. Severus was perhaps the only Slytherin Marlene seemed to be honest with and Lily liked her company. But then Marlene stopped coming around. Lily noticed a change in her, felt her retreating into herself. At the start of their third year, Marlene was different. She seemed to go from an outspoken Scot with six brothers to a doll made of thick porcelain over the summer. Lily inquired about this to Severus and he just shrugged and said she hadn’t really been in their circle anyway. Lily tried a few times to break through Marlene’s icy exterior, but in the end she supposed Severus was right. Years later, she realized how wrong this had been. Remus spoke so highly of her when Lily approached him about it, she thought it couldn’t be that Marlene had felt too good for them. She was always alone, but the sudden and steady presence of Remus around her seemed to bring a forgotten light to the Slytherin’s blue-green eyes. Lily started approaching her, Marlene cautiously opening up to her old friend once again. Halfway through their sixth year, something happened between Remus and Marlene that Lily couldn’t place, but their friendship ended abruptly. Marlene retreated in a way that was very familiar to Lily. She tried, but Marlene was falling deeper and deeper into the pit of her own mind. Lily recognized that there was nothing she could do. It had been nearly three in the morning when Dorcas contacted her, an anxious owl tapping away at her window. The attached scroll explained the situation, that Dorcas had found Marlene in the girls bathroom on the third floor, her lips blue, her skin boiling hot to the touch. Lily, not really knowing what to do but knowing that there was likely only one other person aside from herself that would want to know of this for reasons other than gossip, woke Remus. Together, they ran to the hospital wing. When Marlene was pulled from school, Lily sent her an owl - an apology, and a promise to be there if ever Marlene needed her.

← Mary MacDonald

Mary hadn’t been someone Lily knew on an incredibly personal level. They were in different houses, had different friends. They shared a potions table every now and then, but ultimately they were strangers. Lily noticed her, though. Some time in their fifth year, Lily realized she was seeing Mary infinitely more often than she had been before. When it started, it barely crossed her mind. As it grew, however, Lily pinpointed something undeniable. Mary was seeing Adrion Mulciber. Hand-in-hand, Lily would watch them sneak off together. She could never make out Mulcibers face, but the pink in Mary’s cheeks would’ve been visible from miles away. It set something uncomfortable in Lily’s gut. She knew Mulciber well. He was one of the many people that disapproved of her relationship with Severus. He pushed to get her to disappear, filling his head with nonsense about her worthiness. Severus never openly said this, but Lily could feel the shift in their relationship as it happened. Mulciber was manipulative in the worst way. He was cocky and devious. It baffled her that he could hate one muggleborn and be openly cavorting with another. It didn’t make sense to Lily until, almost in an instant, it became perfectly clear. Mary started disappearing, her subtle absences followed by a dazed look on her face any time Mulciber was near her. Lily was ashamed to admit that she knew what was happening before Mary had gotten hurt, and she wished she had been able to do something about it before it was too late. She told herself that Mary wouldn’t have listened, being that Lily’s friendship with Severus had ended and she had no reason to speak to Mary at all anymore. It wasn’t for lack of trying. After the incident in sixth year with the post office, Lily started approaching Mary. Typically flanked by a protective-looking Dorcas Meadowes, it was a cautious and surface-level friendship at first. Over time, however, the two girls let her in and Lily, for the first time in perhaps her whole life, had a friendship that was sweet, loyal, and - most importantly to her - real.

→ Alice Fortescue

Lily will always remember Alice Fortescue. She had aspired to be her when they were in school. Head girl, liked by most everyone, liberal head on her shoulders, powerful. They were running the same track, Lily simply came up a few years behind. This was for everyone’s benefit, of course. They never had to compete with each other. Unbeknownst to anyone else, hearing of her engagement and subsequent marriage to Frank Longbottom sent sparks of rage through Lily that she might never admit out loud. How could someone be so content with their life that truly hadn’t changed much since the day of her birth? Lily, being full of unrest herself, couldn’t comprehend what such peace of mind felt like. She would have loved to be content marrying James when he asked, but the idea of slipping into that Suzy Homemaker lifestyle made her head spin so swiftly she thought she might hurl or fly off into some prayed-for unknown. She doesn’t understand how Alice likes that, thrives within it even, but a part of her longs to. She craves to pick the other girls brain, maybe try to figure out how to want something everyone seems to think is suited for you.

LILY EVANS IS CURRENTLY CLOSED FOR APPLICATIONS.

[shirlleycoyle]

The Only Thing ‘The Simpsons’ Predicted Is Our Stupidity

If you’re on the internet, you’ve seen the articles. YouTube videos, bargain basement listicles, and social media profiles all ring out with the same refrain: The Simpsons predicted this. Donald Trump’s election, the COVID-19 pandemic, 9/11, murder hornets, and even the explosion in Beirut are all fodder for the shittiest parts of the internet’s favorite content mills.

After 30 years and almost 700 episodes, The Simpsons has become a source of prophecy. It is, of course, all bullshit. When The Simpsons have gotten the future right, it’s only because the show was a razor sharp satire of American life that imagined the worst possible outcome for comedic effect. The Simpsons obviously didn’t have a magical ability to see the future. It’s just that there’s so much of it, people on the internet can splice frames of it together to tell whatever story they want. If it did accidentally predict anything, it’s because our reality is now stupid enough to resemble a cartoon satire of American life.

Like all good satire, The Simpsons held up a mirror. Audiences were scandalized when it premiered in 1989 and they understood that they were part of the joke. But they laughed and kept laughing. Thirty years later, little has changed and many of those early The Simpsons episodes still hit.

Bill Oakley was a writer and a showrunner on The Simpsons during what some fans consider the show’s prime, roughly seasons four through nine. Oakley keeps up with the growing lists of purported predictions and even has them broken down by category.

“Category one, which occurs extremely rarely, is legitimate things we did predict,” he told Motherboard in a Zoom call. “Category two is stuff that just happened in history that people are unaware of because history repeats itself. They aren’t predictions of any sort. Three is just complete bullshit which is usually when somebody pastes two or more old scenes, usually from different shows, together.”

The theory that The Simpsons predicted the Beirut explosion is a typical category three.

“The Beirut one was particularly egregious,” Oakley said. “It was from two different shows and it in no way predicted the Beirut explosion, it just predicted an explosion.”

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Simpsons as prophecy has come in waves. The first real wave came after 9/11 when fans pointed out supposedly secret messages coded the first episode of season nine, “The City of New York vs. Homer Simpson.” In a quick sight gag, Lisa holds up a magazine with a $9 fare to NYC. The $9 is next to Manhattan skyline and the Twin Towers.

But the articles about Simpsons predictions really took off when America elected Donald Trump the President of the United States. In a 2000 episode “Bart to the Future,” Lisa is President and she references the budget crunch she inherited from President Trump.

According to Oakley, this is the only category one prediction he credits.

“‘Always predict the worst, and you'll be hailed as a prophet,’” Oakley said, quoting his comedy hero musical satirist and math genius Tom Lehrer. “Back then, it played as a joke because people were like, ‘Oh, that’s preposterous.’ As [writer Dan Greaney] has said in the past, the reason he picked Trump is that it seemed like the logical last step before hitting rock bottom.”

And here we are at rock bottom.

According to Chris Turner, a journalist and author of Planet Simpson, an academic deep dive into The Simpsons satire and impact on pop culture, one of the reasons The Simpsons has become a source of prophecy is that it’s popular and there’s a lot of it. It’s the same with Nostradamus. The French prophet wrote a book of poetry called Les Prophéties where he vaguely predicted the near future and commented on current events. There’s so much of it and it’s so vague that Nostradamus’ name has become synonymous with prophecy. Every decade, people find new ways to explain how his work predicted their present.

“You have a show that’s been such an institution in western culture for the last 30 years now that it takes on an aspect of parables or Bible stories,” Turner said. “They are these stories that people just come back to again and again and again for new interpretations and new meanings. In the age of gifs and memes, there’s a ton of stuff there to be mined.”

“With almost 700 episodes, there’s an infinite amount of material to choose from,” Oakley said. “There’s probably nothing that you couldn’t say The Simpsons predicted.”

According to Turner, The Simpsons has always had two lives in pop culture. The first is as “this incredibly deep satire that calls out American culture on its excesses,” he said. “But there’s also always been a superficial layer.” The Simpsons was a huge success when it started airing in 1989. It was always a smart show, but it made headlines back then because it was also a crude show.

It may seem ridiculous now, but a 10-year-old boy telling his principal to “eat my shorts” struck some viewers as insidious and disgusting. In a People magazine interview, First Lady Barbara Bush said The Simpsons was the dumbest thing she’d ever seen. “If you weren’t an aficionado during the first four or five years, that was your understanding of the show,” Turner said. “It’s that show with the foul mouthed characters and the boy is unruly.” Turner said that the idea that The Simpsons can predict anything is drawn from this surface understanding of the show.

I loved watching The Simpsons as a kid, and I love rewatching it as an adult. What strikes me most about the show is not the hardline predictions it made, but how it’s dark satire of American culture still holds up. So many of the problems it identified are still problems today.

When Stampy the elephant rampaged through Springfield, he went through the GOP and Democratic conventions. “We want what’s worse for everyone, we’re just plain evil,” the signs in the GOP convention read while people cheer. “We hate life and ourselves, we can’t govern!” The democrat signs read while people boo. When the people of Springfield are faced with a choice between voting for two monstrous aliens, they still can’t break out of the two party system. “Don’t blame me, I voted for Kodos,” Homer said as a whip cracked into his back.

“The Simpsons is one of a number of examples of the limits of satire,” Turner said. “There’s a tendency to think that by pointing out how ridiculous a thing is, it will somehow fix it. A more extreme version of this is John Stewart and Stephen Colbet’s Rally to Restore Sanity.”

Using The Simpsons as divination is also fun. It helps people make sense of a chaotic world. It functions in the same way a good conspiracy does—picking through the tangled mess of modern life and putting it in order. Qanon isn’t that different. The people who follow Q do their “research” and sort through cultural detritus, images, news stories, and half remembered anecdotes to build a narrative that helps them make sense of the world. It’s funny, but it’s also disturbing that humans can connect the dots of disparate pieces to tell whatever story they want. The Simpsons is just a more visible, and more benign, version of this kind of thinking.

If The Simpsons was ever a warning or prophecy, it was a warning about trusting authority.

“There’s a certain segment of society, a very small segment, that read Mad Magazine or watched The Simpsons and got a point of view and developed a skepticism of what authority figures might say,” Oakley said. “There’s 80 percent who didn’t, never gave a shit, and didn’t pay attention to anything. And those people vote and now I’d say we’re paying the price.”

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