#shoutout to the wiki for existing and also making me have to remember the four directions (never eat soggy waffles)

[thegreatcrowdragon]

Got all the effects. We’re in the final stretch now, and I'm not too great with chasers so I'm gonna save this for the morning. Or afternoon considering the time.

[hoodwinkedtoohoodvsevil]

sappy "i've loved my spesh for a year now" post

[[MORE]]

one year ago today, i got into twrp.

that's not to say i wasnt familiar with them before june 3rd, 2019. my big love was nsp, so i very much knew and appreciated them! i remember when nsp played on conan i was so happy for all of them and hoped twrp was getting just as much credit as nsp because they totally deserve it! i remember listening to guardians of the zone a couple years back in david's car and latching onto rock n roll best friends (my first favorite twrp song and still one of my faves!) and listening to that a lot. i remember the third starbomb album coming out last april and thinking, wow, this is definitely their best album musically because of twrp's instrumentation! and of course, like everyone else, i was obsessed with starlight brigade when the video came out, and recognized it was twrp's song featuring dan, not just a dan project. but i didn't have their names memorized, and for whatever reason, i thought they were all silent performers? like, i thought none of them talked and sung only talked/performed with talkbox. (i mean, i was like 60% right? at least at the time.)

on this day last year, i was showing my best friend arin and suzy's (gg) hot pepper gaming videos and then i noticed twrp's in the related videos. i was like oh my gosh! i didn't know twrp did one of these! and you can imagine my surprise when sung and meouch started talking fhfhdjdlfj i was literally like WAIT THEY TALK??? I REALLY THOUGHT NONE OF THEM TALKED. it's always really funny to look back on. and even though they spent most of that video suffering i thought they were so funny and likeable that i was like. maybe i should finally actually get into twrp.

and holy shit.

there's so much to twrp that i know i didn't do it all in a day. it's hard for me to get used to a band by listening to all their music once, so i took it album by album. i started with guardians of the zone, because i was already very familiar with it. listened to that on loop for a while, then moved onto together through time since it was their most recent album at the time. then, i went backwards from there.

i searched for all the lore i could. i read wiki pages, spent literal hours reading reddit AMAs, watched every video on their youtube channel and the hour long compilation of their instagram videos. this all took place over the span of like? a few days? a week? it's hard to say really. i fell so fast.

from that point on, i have so many stories, we would be here all day. i remember listening to believe in your dreams on repeat the day i became a d*sney trainer, and the literal day after that, they released hidden potential. then of course, the release of return to wherever, which i listened to nonstop for ages. the album is my jam because i love albums with a cohesive theme and songs that blend into each other. it's hard to beat together through time, but rtw comes really close.

i saw them for the first time live on july 30th, 2019. unfortunately, something happened that night that changed my life for the worse. but that wasn't twrp's fault at all. the show itself was incredible. i'd never been to a general admission concert of one of my faves, it was absolutely surreal that they were all right in front of me. and of course, they put on a hell of a show. they always do. god, i love them.

on august 9th 2019, i went to my first sung stream. it was a party stream and i'm on the east coast, so i stayed up until 3 AM to hear sung give me my first talkbox shoutout. i recorded it and still have the video. it made me smile in the early part of a very dark time in my life.

i made a lot of friends in that stream, we all shared twitters and i'm still friends/mutuals with all of them! and i've only made more friends since, especially at nsp10. nsp10 was incredible for many reasons, but a big one was that the three hours my fiancé and i were waiting outside the venue to be let in, we were just walking around saying hi to my twrp friends, meeting a bunch of them for the first time. and i made new friends! i remember standing in a group, shivering in my heart boner cosplay, and one of the guys saying "you're artie, right? i follow you on twitter, i love your cosplay!" he seemed like he was really gathering the courage to say it to me, he had no idea how happy it would make me! (shoutout to logan! you're awesome!)

really, if any of my twrp friends are reading this, i love you to pieces. meeting you has definitely been a high point of the last 365 days.

again, i have so many stories. but since this is already so long i'm just gonna cut to march 5th, 2020. that was the night i met them. now, i'm not a shy person at all, and over the past few years i haven't really been very socially anxious. i'm able to carry myself in conversation, even with strangers. but i've never met a fave before. let alone four faves at once. so, naturally, everything i had planned on saying completely left my brain. but they're literally the best, so it was still an absolute dream. the first thing sung said when he saw me was "hey you look great!" (my outfit was clearly inspired by his own, fancy orange hat and all, so he probs wanted to Respect The Drip but he was right regardless and also HOLY SHIT) and i had my baby porg gary with me (the sunshine of my life) and they all interacted with him and it was super wholesome.

they played two nights in orlando, and i went to both shows because of course i did. first night was great, second night was even better even though that was my GA show. they played life party on night 2, which might as well be my favorite song of all time. it has carried me through every bad moment since i first heard it. big and small. i have a lyric from it tattoo'd on my arm as a constant reminder that i'm alive, and that is something to be ecstatic about. i also had more room to dance and move around on night 2, and dance and move around i did. then, when the show was over and scatman played, i got out everything else i had. august-november 2019 was actual hell for me, and i was still dealing with the aftermath of it all. but that concert high made me realize, holy shit! all of it is over! it doesn't matter anymore! twrp carried me through one of the roughest periods of my life, and met me at the finish line with a fucking gold medal. i fucking did it. now i have none of the bad, and all of the good. it was one of the best feelings i've ever had, and one of the happiest nights of my life.

since then, twrp continues to keep me going. of course the world has been a total shitshow, but everyone's streams (especially the twrp show) have been the highlight of my week every week.

i've always considered myself a very positive person, but last year was a very bad year for my depression, as well as traumatic at times. and i've always had problems feeling understood. i still do. but twrp said hey! literally nobody understands us. not even ourselves! but that's okay! we want you to be happy and feel loved and supported no matter what. and i really can't thank them enough for it.

this part is mostly for another longer post, but i wanted to mention it since it's also really important. i fully came to terms with being a mlm last year after years of compulsory heterosexuality, and twrp played a big part in me exploring and accepting that about myself. and i was already very secure in my gender identity when i found them, but hearing "this song goes out to all the ladies, fellas, and everyone in between" shook me to my very core. i've never loved a band that literally said "shoutout to trans/nb people" at every concert. god. i love them so fucking much.

so this was even longer than i expected (and i expected it to be long bc yknow. spesh.) but i just have so much love and gratitude for this band. every day of my life i'm so thankful that doctor sung, commander meouch, lord phobos, and havve hogan exist and are spreading all this love and positivity to their fans every day. i've never loved a band like this, and i probably never will. they are truly special.

and it's only been a year!!!!

[zeetheus]

A Single Pale Rose

a.k.a. my complete teardown of everything that this episode affects, off the top of my head, and with the caveat that I haven’t read anyone else’s post-episode discussion/theorizing at all, and know a couple spoilers from a few later eps

So Rose Quartz was actually Pink Diamond all along. She didn’t want to be Pink Diamond anymore for whatever reason, she ordered her Pearl to ‘shatter’ her while taking on her own Rose Quartz visage, thus giving the impression that Pink was permagone, while in actually she reformed in a completely new form including shifting the orientation of her gem, and lived on while pretending to be a completely different variety of gem. She also forbade Pearl from ever telling anyone the truth about it, and Pearl seems physically unable to disobey that.

First off, shoutout to the wiki editors who are now tearing down all of the information on the ‘rose quartz gem variety’ that we extrapolated from Pink Diamond, because most of it is now defunct. The only canonical information we now have on rose quartzes are ‘Pink Diamond made them’ and ‘all of them are bubbled in the human zoo.’

I theorize that Pink Diamond (henceforth Rose with a capital r) made them specifically, in part, to be her later disguise, or at least guided their creation in a way so that she could easily take on the form of one with little issue.

Rose, being a diamond and not a quartz, lied to her soldiers to hell and back. I don’t know whether or not she was lying through her teeth when she gave Bismuth the impression that she was ‘made right here (on Earth) in the dirt’ but yanno, maybe she didn’t do that specifically, sometimes people over-romanticize their leaders. Still, there’s no longer any weight behind ‘but she was different’ because... of course she was, she was one of four existent diamonds and was, by definition, different from other rose quartzes, and even other gems.

Her goals were still noble and good, but much of the impact of her ‘uniqueness’ as ‘a quartz who broke through her station’ is now completely gone. Maybe it still does hold some impact, since she is a ‘diamond who broke through her station’ now instead, but I’m not particularly impressed with that angle. She was already unique - the one and only Pink Diamond. There were a bunch of rose quartzes. By the way, the actual rose quartzes were all nearly shattered, if it wasn’t for Blue’s sentimentality.

Pearl not actually being (entirely) defective was also a strange thing to consider. Sure she ‘defected from Homeworld’ but she never ‘defected’ from her Diamond-given purpose as a Pearl - she served Pink Diamond until the end, and even beyond. Perhaps Pearl is unique in that way, as the only Crystal Gem to bring her purpose with her. (Although admittedly I don’t remember if/how Rose felt about their relationship in that aspect, but I’m guessing she wasn’t too hot on Pearl being 100% subservient to her.)

This angle I can’t blame Rose for specifically, because it was undoubtedly the other Diamonds who brought the brute force, but there were thousands of gems shattered and thousands more corrupted as a result of the Diamonds seeking to avenge her supposed shattering. Sure she gained her freedom, and brought many other freedom-seeking gems with her, but was it right of her to deceive literally all of those followers and bring them into a war that she played a part in initiating?

Either way it’s clear that she felt a lot of sorrow and loss and even guilt as a result of the war, and dedicated hundreds of years to trying to reverse the corruption that her Diamond family had done to her fellow Crystal Gems.

This makes me wonder whether or not Steven was right when he called Rose a ‘coward’ in Storm in the Room (?) - Rose had already run away from her life as a Diamond consequences be damned, is it really too far-fetched to believe now that one of her goals in having Steven was to run away from her life again, this time as a Rose Quartz, consequences be damned again? Maybe! It sure is something I keep thinking about now that we’ve been given an entirely new angle on the Pink Diamond Murder Mystery.

The main reason I hated the “Rose is Pink Diamond” theory from the moment it was first proposed is that it solves the plot’s problems through sheer coincidence. Preventing a Diamond attack is easy now, just communicate to them in some form that you are the reborn version of the supposedly dead person they’re trying to avenge, and they’ll probably understand at least a little bit! Communicating that effectively is tough, yeah, but other than communication, Steven got to where he is now though luck and sheer coincidence, and that’s exactly what happens to get him out of it too!! Isn’t that fulfilling?!?!

I’m genuinely furious that we won’t get an endgame high-stakes de-escalation of the Diamonds from an ‘uninvolved’ side, because the person involved who just wants to live his life on the former Pink Diamond colony is now both ‘the rose quartz who is famous for shattering Pink Diamond’ and ‘Pink Diamond who was shattered by a rose quartz.’ So if you’re ever caught in a situation where you need to de-escalate an emotionally complicated situation from breaking out into an incredibly one-sided war of extermination, just be lucky enough to be the triple-layered one-of-a-kind physical embodiment of the thing everyone is fighting about, and everything will be A-OK!

Yes triple-layered. The only half-human-half-gem? Probably! The half-human-half-gem who was formerly the leader of a huge rebellion and managed to shatter a Diamond? Ok, we were given enough hints to that, yeah. The only half-human-half-gem who is not only literally the previous, but also the gem half is the half of a Diamond, actually, who faked her own shattering to live her life as a completely different gem and told absolutely no one besides her Pearl? Jesus christ that’s a long fucking jump, but the show gave it a real go.

I guess it was The Plan for the larger plot all along, which makes me extremely disappointed in the show from that angle. Yeah the stuff about love and understanding is good, extremely great actually, but the fact that ‘luck’ is such a key component in solving the Pink Diamond Murder Mystery makes said murder mystery feel cheap as hell.

Also I feel cheated out of a potentially fun new (old) diamond in Pink, but I guess if I ever decide to sit down and rewatch the show, knowing she was Rose all along might give me some fun things to notice.

[loftyloftyloftyloftylofty]

Hello! Sorry if you've covered this a lot, I was just wondering - do you have any guides you'd recommend to a beginner in pixel art? Also, any guides on getting into game development? (mainly the programming side of it) Again, sorry if you've covered it and/or these asks sound demanding.

Hmmn, I can help a little bit! Buckle up.

The guide that I think is the most useful is not actually a guide for pixel art. It talks about using colors and using light sources.

There are a lot of different styles of pixel art, and I think that most of the time it is safe to say that a pixel art style is defined by its rules. Rules create consistency. Consistency creates immersive work.

We can use Starbound’s pixel art style as a simple example of how to create art that has rules. Starbound’s wiki actually has a guide set up to help people create their own assets, but it misses a few important details.

Some (but not all) of the rules that many starbound pixel art pieces use:

1. Most of the objects in starbound are drawn so that you can see the front corner of an object. Here’s an example:

The back half of an object rotated this way usually takes up about 25% of the width of the object. If you look at the other tables, chairs,and props in the game, you’ll see that most of them follow the 25% corner rule.

2. Most of the objects in starbound use a 4-tone palette. The 4 shades of brown used for the wood of this object are the same shades of brown that they use for most other wooden things. The four shades of yellow come from their brass palette. Consistency with colors can be very helpful if you use it correctly.

3. Starbound’s light source is always top-right. Every piece of art in the game is shaded as though there was a single white light to the top-right of the art.

So with all of this in mind, if we take a look at my art for Cat Story, we’ll see a few differences from Starbound’s style.

Using Cat Story’s art style, most objects are drawn with a camera angle directly from the front. The 25% corner rule does not exist in Cat Story. 

The light source in Cat Story is usually from the top-left... even if there are lights in the room. 

Most of the time, I use colors from the 6bit RGB palette.

Some styles of pixel art don’t need to limit which colors are used. My style uses these colors as a general guideline, but sometimes I lighten or darken colors from this palette to give myself a few extra colors to work with, like the background wallpaper in the room above.

This color palette has a lot more color saturation than the palettes used in Starbound’s art, which is why it doesn’t really mesh that great when you recolor your Starbound character using this palette. 

Looks weird and out of place, right?

If you adjust the color levels in the image by a tiny amount, it becomes very very easy to see just how much more saturated Cat Story’s colors actually are!

What happens when we put art from Starbound into a screenshot from Cat Story? Well, it looks very out of place, because it follows different rules for color, size, shape, and shading.

Sometimes, rules get more abstract. Cat Story also uses rules for color heat. Thinking about colors relative to their distance from white or black, with white being the hottest color and black being the coolest color offers some insight into interesting color relationships.

Remember that 6bit RGB palette? This is what it looks like when you take the color away and only look at the heat:

Color heat is a tool that you can use to direct the viewer’s eye to important pieces of your art. 

I try to make the character one of the brightest objects on the screen so that they are easy to see for the player. 

The next brightest things are usually terrain that you can walk on or objects that you can interact with.

The darkest objects are background props.

Obviously, sometimes it’s appropriate to make exceptions to make a piece of art look more interesting! I have many brightly lit windows in the underground city maps in Cat Story - but I try to keep them small and unobtrusive when I can.

It also helps a lot if you make your enemies easy to see.

Rules and color choice are only the beginning of defining an art style with pixel art. 

Some people prefer super low resolution artwork ( @thewakingcloak ), and others prefer comparatively massive canvases ( @shmoopdev ) . 

Some people use 3D models to give themselves a better frame of reference for their pixel art. ( http://oddtales.net/ )

Some people use dithering ( @lazymoth - check out their creepycastle project ) to shade and create gradients, other ( @virgovsthezodiac ) people ( @ramheadedgirl ) prefer ( @preecedev ) flat  ( @artificerdev ) shading styles.

Anyway I’ve spent an hour or two longer than I expected on this reply, so let’s move on to the other half of your question.

How do you get into game programming?

It depends on what language you want to program in. Personally, my hammer of choice for game development is C++.

There are a lot of different places to start if you’re brand new, but no matter what programming language you want to use, you need to know some programming basics.

This is the resource that was most useful for me to begin programming games in C++. Shoutouts to Lazyfoo!

Websites like stackexchange / stackoverflow also help a lot when learning basics of programming. 

What are some things that are important to know if you want to program your own games?

Learn how to do things using timers. If you attempt to do huge amounts of stuff all at the same time, it is often more complicated than simply doing a little bit of work once per frame. Breaking up your workload with timers often helps performance, too.

Start with a small project, like clicking on a colored dot for points. I thought a platformer would be easy and I’m here 3 years later still trying to finish what I started. Do not attempt to build some enormous MMO as your first project, that is a bad idea; speaking from experience here.

Learn to keep your code clean. Comment everything even if it’s obvious what it does, because 5 weeks from now it won’t be obvious anymore.

Learn the difference between public and private variables/functions and use them appropriately so you don’t trip yourself later on accident. That’s the reason those safeguards exist - to help you not accidentally use the wrong tools.

You are going to need to be able to understand math relationships. The computer will do the heavy lifting for you, but you need to understand the formulas and why they work. Basic things like moving from point A to point B, which looks like this:

new_position = old_position + normal( destination - old_position ) * movement_speed

 Thankfully, most of these math relationships are very easy to use once you understand them. Now is a good time to brush up on your trig.

If you’re going into gamedev in C++, learning how pointers and references work is non-negotiable.

Some other notes: 

A lot of helpful code libraries are out there on the internet that are designed specifically for making games. Most of these helpful libraries are free for you to do anything you want with them. SDL2 is my weapon of choice, but there are many other options available that might be better for what you want to do.

Sometimes it is appropriate to use tools like GameMaker or RPG Maker to make a game. Sometimes it isn’t. It is useful to know how to use these tools, and it is also useful to know how to get your hands dirty and do it yourself.

Lots of games have basic programming included! You can learn a lot about how programming basics work from reverse engineering objects in Garry’s mod, SecondLife, Starbound, and plenty of other places.

There are hotwings on my desk that need my attention.Hopefully this is more helpful than “Practice a lot and also google some stuff”

Cheers,Lofty

[accio-transcript]

Mod R: Hello, welcome to the oneshot accio-shitpost podcast. I’m Mod R, otherwise known as Roxie, and my pronouns are she/her, thank you very much. And you are?

Mod H: And I’m Mod H, otherwise known as LH, and my pronouns are they/them.

Mod R: Um, so, we’re going to be asking some of your questions!

Mod H: We’re going to be answering some of their questions. We’ll also ask them!

Mod R: They’re fresh off the…question mill, being made by our lovely question workers, in the question mill.

Mod H: In the question mines.

Mod R: theshieldswordandcrown.tumblr.com says ‘If y’all’ – nice Texan shit there – [in bad American accent] ‘If y’all could go to any magical school, which one would it be? Doesn't have to be in the HP universe, either.’ So I don’t know about any other universes apart from the Harry Potter universe that has magical schools, apart from the Worst Witch, which I doubt you know about!

Mod H: Yeah, I’ve got an even more obscure one, but I’m not even gonna mention-

Mod R: Tell me, tell me.

Mod H: Okay, so, do you know Anthony Horowitz? The horror writer?

Mod R: Yes.

Mod H: Well he wrote a horror, erm, couple of horror books for kids about a magic school called Groosham Grange, where basically all of the kids were fucked up. But to actually answer the question, I guess it’d have to be Hogwarts.

Mod R: Hogwarts. Like, I wanna be, like, special, and think of another magical school-

Mod H: But honestly…

Mod R: Are there any other magical schools?

Mod H: No…

Mod R: Um…the Bureau of Balance.

Mod H: Good one.

Mod R: Um, do they teach? I guess they do, don’t they.

Mod H: I mean, Angus learned magic there.

Mod R: From Taako.

Mod H: So it’s like a magic school because of that.

Mod R: Yeah…the Bureau of Balance is from the McElroy brother and father’s The Adventure Zone.

Mod H: Which, check it out if you haven’t.

Mod R: Check it out. It’s good. You’ll like it.

Mod H: Check it out if you like magical fantasy stuff that starts out totally silly and ends up giving you emotions.

Mod H: Anonymous said, ‘Five questions for your 100k thingy. 1) how do you come up with your clever post ideas like how its not fair 2) um... 3) lemme think 4) I... 5) yeah, I’ve only got one question.. never mind.’

Mod R: Yeah, so this is, it reads as bad as it sounds.

Mod H: Yeah. Sorry, anon.

Mod R: No offense anon, I’m sure you’re lovely.

Mod H: But to actually answer your question…

Mod R: Um…

Mod H: Straight off the dome.

Mod R: Straight off the dome-piece. One hundred percent.

Mod H: There are two methods – one of them is ‘oh no I haven’t filled up the queue, um, um, let’s make a post about…lamp’.

Mod R: Yeah, yeah. Like sometimes if you look through the posts, um-

Mod H: You can totally see a thought process.

Mod R: Yeah yeah, so like there was one about a unicycle and a Segway straight after each other in the batch that just came out.

Mod H: Two about Godzilla, recently, as well. I had Godzilla on the brain.

Mod R: Yeah, yeah, sometimes we reorder them so it doesn’t look like…but it’s totally obvious. If it’s from within twenty four hours it’s probably from the same.

Mod H: The other method is that…when we phone call each other, we just brainstorm.

Mod R: Yeah yeah yeah, and here’s one, I’m not sure if you do this anymore, um, but, I certainly used to do this and whenever I make posts now it’s um, I go to the Harry Potter wiki.

Mod H: Yeah.

Mod R: And like, I haven’t done this for a while.

Mod H: I used to do that too, yeah.

Mod R: Because Cursed Child and we didn’t want any spoilers.

Mod H: Heh. I knew the spoilers. I’m trash.

Mod R: You knew the spoilers.

Mod H: You didn’t.

Mod R: And we just used to click ‘random page’, and whatever – okay, here’s the bad bit about this. There’s a page for every day of the year.

Mod H: Everything.

Mod R: Every day of the year in – like, you say ‘did anything happen on January 21st in the Harry Potter universe?’ You can look it up!

Mod H: I don’t know but we can check!

Mod R: We can check!

Mod H: The third method we use to make shitposts, of course, is asking someone else. Shoutout to Mod K, who gives me-

Mod R: Yeah, that’s fucking true.

Mod R: Okay. Next question is from anythingcanonwillbeshipped.tumblr.com, who appropriately asks, ‘Drarry, Scorbus, both, or neither??’ And-

Mod H: Well, there’s an obvious answer to this.

Mod R: There’s an obvious answer to this. Scorbus. One hundred percent Scorbus.

Mod H: Scorbus.

Mod R: Like, no offense to all you Drarry shippers, it’s – okay right, I’ve never been a Drarry shipper.

Mod H: Me neither.

Mod R: Despite – despite some of our posts.

Mod H: We have made jokes about it.

Mod R: I do think that Draco Malfoy might have had a crush on Harry for a while.

Mod H: It’s totally a viable thing, like it would be interesting to see a well-developed dynamic between them.

Mod R: Yeah, yeah. There’s some good fics out there about that, but I’m just not about them being in a relationship.

Mod H: Yeah, personally.

Mod R: Until at least they’re adults.

Mod H: Yeah.

Mod R: And by then, they’re both married. Which is fine, you can still ship them, but like –

Mod H: The Cursed Child versions of them, it’d be particularly interesting to see them together.

Mod R: Yeah. I was about to say, the closest I’ve ever come to shipping Drarry – and I did ship it a lil bit.

Mod H: A lil bit.

Mod R: Is when I watched the Cursed Child. And you, most people listening to it probably haven’t watched it.

Mod H: Yeah, uh, we’ve been quite lucky to have the privilege of seeing Cursed Child-

Mod R: Yeah, because we’re both local to London. Not, we’re not really, I mean you’re – you live very far away-

Mod H: You’re more local.

Mod R: I live kinda far away. daq – as in d-a-q – litterqueen.tumblr.com, no dashes, says ‘#accio100k firstly, congrats!!!’ Thank you!’ :D secondly, combine the color of the t-shirt you are wearing and the name of the last food you ate and WALLA, reveal your unique spell!’ Okay so…mine’s…blue and I last ate – I had pizza, so I’ve got blue pizza, blueizza.

Mod H: Bleetza.

Mod R: I’m gonna say blueizza, because I’m not a fucking scrub.

Mod H: My shirt’s dark blue, like I guess navy, yeah, so navy chips.

Mod R: Nips.

Mod H: Oh God. Nips!

Mod R: It’s nips.

Mod H: Okay. Anonymous asked ‘time is an illusion that man made up to understand the fourth dimension’.

Mod R: More of a statement than a – but this is something I like to talk about. I know a little bit about physics, I dropped physics in GCSE but I’ve still remained very interested in it, and I still read up on it, I’ve read a lot of books about physics…er, I know this sounds like I’m bigging myself up but I’m really not, I’m kinda trash.

Mod H: But you know a bit-

Mod R: People say a lot, time isn’t real, humans made up time. That’s strictly not true. Time is a measurable thing, and we made up the measurements for it, and we’re like ‘oh half past four’ – half past four is made up, that’s not real.

Mod H: Yeah.

Mod R: Time itself is a real dimension that plays into the universe. If time didn’t exist, nothing would happen. That’s how-that’s how it works. Time is just the way we describe things happening in an order.

Mod H: It’s sort of like time is a thing, but our measurements of time is an illusion.

Mod R: Yeah yeah, like people could say space is fake. That’s not true. One metre is fake, we made that up, but like space is definitely real and the distance between me and, like, the bed in front of me might be a metre, and that’s fake, but it’s still in front of me, like it still exists.

Mod H: Yeah. It’s still that distance away, no matter how much-

Mod R: Same for time. So thank you for giving me this. Time is an illusion that man made up, to understand the fourth dimension, is closer to the truth but not quite. Anonymous asks ‘How old are y’all’ [in fake American accent] ‘How old are y’all and what do you do. Are yoi students?’ There’s an upside down question mark there-

Mod H: We are Yuri on Ice students.

Mod R: We’re not.

Mod H: We’re not students or Yuri on Ice.

Mod R: It’s spelled y-o-i, it’s a typo apparently. Are you students? I’m…technically on a gap year I might go to uni in a year or so. You’re not a student anymore.

Mod H: I’m not a student anymore.

Mod R: You’re in the in-between place between getting a job and going to uni.

Mod H: Yeah. I am unemployed!

Mod R: I’m between coming out from education to either going to further education or a job, or both. So we’re both sorta floating right now.

Mod H: Yeah, we’re sort of in a transitional phase.

Mod R: Ha ha ha. donutmesswithme.tumblr.com-

Mod H: Good name.

Mod R: Good name. Says ‘How was your day?’ Eh, it was okay.

Mod H: You had a hot dog. It was a good day.

Mod R: Okay, yeah, I had a hot dog, that was good. Good day-a good day.

Mod H: Gourmet hot dog, good day.

Mod R: pantless-wonder.tumblr.com, shout out to you, says ‘Thoughts on My Immortal (the original fanfic, people behind it, web series, and unrelated YouTube videos claiming to be the authors)?’ So, first of all, the original fanfiction, I have not read the entire way though.

Mod H: I have read the entirety of it, ‘cos I went through a very bad Harry Potter fanfiction phase when I was younger.

Mod R: Do you believe-are you one who believes that it’s fake, that it’s a troll fic, or do you think it’s real?

Mod H: I believe it’s a particularly well-crafted troll fic.

Mod R: Really. I’m not sure? Okay, I think the biggest-okay, right, I was so sure that it was real because fanfiction used to definitely be like that, back when they used the word ‘lemon’, you know.

Mod H: Back in those days. I remember those days.

Mod R: It used to be like that! And I know kids who could’ve written that.

Mod H: I could’ve written that.

Mod R: Strange kids, yeah. What ticks off for me, and makes me think-and I’ve talked about this a lot of time, that it’s a troll fic-

Mod H: Yeah I think we’ve had this discussion.

Mod R: We’ve had this conversation a lot. Yeah. At one point, she accidentally calls Tom Riddle Tom Bombadil?

Mod H: Yeah, there’s no way-

Mod R: And here’s the thing, here’s the thing. Right. That’s not a typo, and autocorrect didn’t exist back then, okay. Tom Bombadil was a very minor character in the book The Lord of the Rings, not the movie, the books. Like, the fact that she would know such a character, like, implies-cos she said she didn’t even read the Harry Potter books and just watched the movies, she would not have read Lord of the Rings if she had not read Harry Potter.

Mod H: She would not know who Tom Bombadil-I mean, I think for me, like a lot of the language is ridiculous and over the top, and a lot of the supposed spelling errors are so-

Mod R: Like, okay, there’s a couple of thing that are like, could definitely be real but probably aren’t with the context of Tom Bombadil, like, such as, ‘I ate my Count Chocula with blood’.

Mod H: Yeah.

Mod R: And that’s the thing that like, some emo scene kid in 200-whatever would have said, but like I think that she was just very ahead of her time in terms of like staging a fic.

Mod H: Yeah, I mean, in a lot of ways My Immortal was very much the prototype on which all previous-all later trollfics even were based.

Mod R: Yeah.

Mod H: Like, it became…

Mod R: It’s like the proto-trollfic.

Mod H: Basically. And one thing that I really like in myself is how well they really characterised that behind-the-scenes narrative going on, with like the friend and writing the character based on their friend out and then back in.

Mod R: Yeah.

Mod H: And then when the fic got ‘hacked’, and suddenly everything was all preppy because some troll had hacked them on the internet. And the way the grammar broke down as well after the supposed proofreader stopped doing it.

Mod R: But of course you’d just like delete the prep fics, wouldn’t you, if you hacked it back.

Mod H: Yeah, you wouldn’t like keep it. I mean, the whole thing’s gone now. But there’s archives. You can find it.

Mod R: Yeah, you’ll find it. Webseries. Have you seen the webseries?

Mod H: I haven’t seen it. I know it exists, but-

Mod R: Being someone involved in webseries, hint hint nudge nudge, check out the Uncanny Upshurs on youtube.com, but erm I’ve watched that with the creator of the Uncanny Upshurs, well, the co-creator, with Ingrid Nixie Greep herself, and I very much enjoyed it.

Mod H: The legend.

Mod R: I haven’t seen season two, so don’t spoil that for me. But I really liked it! It was very bare bones special effects. What they did was, when they had a wand fight near the end of it, um, when they like cast a spell, they would do like star effects, like the shape of like a star, and it’d make like a crack noise, and it was really nice because it was like stylised. The, er, unrelated YouTube videos claiming to be authors…you’ve sent me one I haven’t watched.

Mod H: I, yeah, I found one.

Mod R: That claims to be.

Mod H: It wasn’t that, it was that…the girls behind it were supposedly called Willow and Tara, and there was something with two girls saying they, like, ‘New Years 2007, but I don’t know why you celebrate New Years cos we’re all gonna die anyway’. And the fact that they had the same names as the supposed authors of My Immortal was like…people were wondering whether those were the same people.

Mod R: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mod H: As for people coming out later saying that they authored My Immortal-

Mod R: Unless JK Rowling comes out and says it, I’m not-

Mod H: Same.

Mod R: Until Jo says it.

Mod H: But like all of them are probably riding on the popularity of the fic.

Mod R: shitlordanakin.tumblr.com says ‘How did you feel the first time you saw a post of yours screenshotted on HP instagram accounts?’ We didn’t. We don’t use Instagram.

Mod H: No, neither of us actually do.

Mod R: And I’ve never seen any of our posts on Facebook. We’ve seen them on Buzzfeed?

Mod H: I’ve seen…I’ve seen a few of them on Facebook.

Mod R: I might have seen a couple now…

Mod H: Some of my friends linked me to them.

Mod R: But like, what happened usually is our friends that know about us send us screenshots before we see them. We’re fine with it, because, as long as they source us – usually, if we find someone who isn’t sourcing us we talk to them, and we’re like ‘hey, can you do that’, but like if they’re not sourcing us, we’ve made so many posts that we forget which ones are ours.

Mod H: And a couple of people have even come to us like ‘I want to set up an Instagram with and use your stuff, is that okay’ and like, it’s fine!

Mod R: And we talk to them, and we’re like, yeah, it’s cool. They had more followers than us then.

Mod H: That was good.

Mod R: But they weren’t just posting our stuff, so, it was original content as well. And Instagram, I think, is a whole different ballgame to tumblr.

Mod H: Yeah. I don’t understand it.

Mod R: Neither do I.

Mod H: lunaloveboook says-

Mod R: Aw, that’s a good-three ‘o’s, by the way.

Mod H: lunaloveboook. ‘For the podcast: 1)How did it started? 2) And I really loved when Something Big And Bad happened and you put all your efforts in reassuring people’

Mod R: So that’s one question and a statement, and-I’m gonna answer the question first, and then talk about the statement.

Mod H: Ok. Do you wanna tell this story, cos? You kinda instigated it.

Mod R: Yeah, so, I was just sending like bad Harry Potter jokes to LH.

Mod H: This happens sometimes.

Mod R: I remember walking from my school to Subway and back, to get a Subway-

Mod H: She was just sending me all these jokes, and I was replying with some.

Mod R: Yeah yeah, and we were like ‘we can make this into a blog’, and then we decided to post ten a day, we posted a few off the bat, made a tag – back then we tagged everything with ‘dank memes’ and stuff as well, so, to get to the target-

Mod H: We really didn’t know what we were doing.

Mod R: We didn’t know what we were talking-to try and get to the biggest audience.

Mod H: Yeah.

Mod R: Nowadays, since we don’t need any help with that, we just tag with the characters involved and hope there’s some fans looking through the tags maybe.

Mod H: Yeah. Cos I mean we tag the most obscure-and we tag like full names as well, that’s obviously not, like nobody’s gonna be-

Mod R: Like, if we make a post about Draco Malfoy, then somebody might-

Mod H: But like nobody’s going to be tracking Xenophilius Lovegood – or like not a lot of people. But like ones who aren’t usually referred to by their full name, like Pomona Sprout, we tag her as that.

Mod R: Oh fuck, I didn’t even know that was her name.

Mod H: There you go.

Mod R: ‘And I really loved when Something Big And Bad happened and you put all your efforts in reassuring people’

Mod H: Thank you!

Mod R: For those of you who don’t know, this is referring to the [cough]election last year.

Mod H: [cough]America.

Mod R: Yeah, um, of a country that we’re not – that I’ve been to, a bunch of times.

Mod H: I haven’t.

Mod R: You want to go there, because you want – I’ve actually been to the theme park.

Mod H: I wanna go to Disneyland.

Mod R: Which I am incredibly privileged to have been to. Thank you? I mean like, we felt like it just wasn’t the time for jokes, you know, instead we…what happened was, Donald Trump got elected, and we were like, this is a bit crass to post jokes today, because people are going-and people sent us messages like ‘you’re overreacting’ and maybe we were a bit, but, there are a lot of people who are genuinely afraid.

Mod H: And we basically had a conversation about it that morning and we said, we’re gonna keep posting regular content but we’re also just gonna say, you know, our askbox is open. And a few asks started trickling in so we started answering, and a whole lot of asks started trickling in.

Mod R: Because we answered hundreds that day.

Mod H: Yeah, I mean, I remember having to give up at one point because my hands were cramping because I’d been typing that hard?

Mod R: Yeah, and-like, I don’t wanna big myself up. We feel like what we did anybody in our shoes would have done. Like, this isn’t something that I feel proud of – I mean, I’m proud that I’m a good enough person to have done it-

Mod H: It’s not like a huge-

Mod R: I don’t wanna be, like, praised for it, you know, like anyone in our shoes would have done this. But thank you for the question.

Mod H: And thank you for the compliment.

Mod R: wizardingviolet asks-

Mod H: It’s a good question.

Mod R: ‘Do you ship any LGBT pairing or headcanon that isn't one of the "classics" ? (like Wolfstar, Drarry and’…how do you say ‘Deamus’? Day-mus?

Mod H: Dee-mus, I go for.

Mod R: Like, Dean and Seamus, Day-mus, Dee-mus…um-

Mod H: Well, there’s an obvious answer to this one, that we both have immediately.

Mod R: Luna Lovegood and Ginny Weasley.

Mod H: Luna and Ginny.

Mod R: Luna and Ginny!

Mod H: Luna and Ginny.

Mod R: Ginny and Luna!

Mod H: Linny-Linny.

Mod R: Guna?

Mod H: I just made that up by accident but that’s the ship name now! Other than that, probably-

Mod R: Headcanons though. I have a bunch of trans headcanons.

Mod H: Oh yeah, yeah.

Mod R: Like, I like to see Luna as a trans girl but that’s only because I relate to her a lot – I don’t like necessarily think there’s any evidence for that. Not that you need evidence to believe, but like there’s no other reason for me to believe that other than I really identify with her.

Mod H: That makes sense, though.

Mod R: But like we all do that. Neville’s bi, as far as I’m concerned.

Mod H: Oh my gosh, that’s really cute.

Mod R: Neville’s bi, and like he had a crush on Harry for the first three years.

Mod H: I’ve now decided that Neville’s in like a weird polyamorous relationship with Dean and Seamus.

Mod R: Someone said, ‘RONALD WEASLEY. HOW DARE YOU STEAL THAT CAR! YOUR FATHER IS NOW FACING AN INQUIRY AT WORK, AND IT IS ENTIRELY YOUR FAULT! IF YOU DO SO MUCH AS PUT ANOTHER TOE OUT OF LINE, YOU WILL BE SENT STRAIGHT. HOME Oh, and accio-shitpost, dear, congratulations on reaching 100k followers. Your father and I are so proud!’

Mod H: Thank you, Molly Weasley.

Mod R: Thank you, mam! Mam!

Mod H: We didn’t know that any-

Mod R: Does this mean that we’re in a relationship with Luna Lovegood, because I’m okay with that.

Mod H: We didn’t know that any fictional characters from the Harry Potter universe were following our blog, but like-

Mod R: Nice. It’s good to hear that my mother, Molly Weasley, is a real person.

Mod H: It’s good to hear from you guys!

Mod H: Okay. briarrosebydayaurorabynight asks 'What inspired you to start the shitposting? Besides Harry Potter obviously.'

Mod R: Um.

Mod H: Honestly?

Mod R: Memes.

Mod H: Yeah, we just sort of started.

Mod R: We’ve sort of answered when we started and what caused us to start, but like what inspires us? Like, just honestly those big other shitpost accounts. Like, I’m not sure if we knew about others at the time but um, like just-shower-thoughts is a famous one that everybody sees. Um. Anonymous says ‘Have any of you ever been in love?’

Mod H: NO.

Mod R: ‘Also one of you must be gay, so who is it?’ Ok so, why must one of us be gay, and also how did you know that?

Mod H: I mean, like every other post we make is about how Ginny and Luna should be together.

Mod R: That’s true. But like, you believe that and you’re not even gay.

Mod H: I mean. Full disclosure.

Mod R: You’re also not straight.

Mod H: I am super aromantic, so like…I think that lets them know which one of us is gay here.

Mod R: I’m…a lesbian.

Mod H: But erm. Speaking for me, I’ve never had the romos.

Mod R: No. Um, I’ve been in love multiple times.

Mod H: You’re a big old softie.

Mod R: Yeah. Uh, I have a-well, I’m polyamorous and I have just like a bunch of girlfriends. Just a bunch. I’ve been in love multiple times and it sure is a trip!

Mod H: Anonymous asked, ‘How do you keep your shit posts fresh and steaming and avoid posting stale ones?’

Mod R: We don’t.

Mod H: We really don’t.

Mod R: Is the answer, we just don’t.

Mod H: We’ve definitely, by this point, repeated ourselves a couple of times.

Mod R: Right ok, there’s definitely a post we’ve done at least three times, and that is ‘I can’t believe that the reward for beating the dragon in Goblet of Fire is a screaming egg’. We’ve done that one like three times!

Mod H: But erm, to actually answer the question, there are a few times that we like, go back and-because we think we’ve made this post before, and we find that we have made this exact same post before. Word-for-word.

Mod R: Also, um, usually.

Mod H: So that’s embarrassing.

Mod R: I’m not afraid to admit that it’s you usually making shitposts these days.

Mod H: Yeah.

Mod R: And I usually deal with like asks and stuff instead.

Mod H: I mean, we both do make shitposts, and we both do answer asks.

Mod R: Yeah.

Mod H: But like, primarily those are-

Mod R: Um, yeah, and what we often do it, I’ll look through the shitposts you make, and I’ll like edit them. You can-there was this one a long time ago that-

Mod H: Oh, that one’s a classic example of that happening.

Mod R: There was one that was like ‘Ron: You’re a girl right Hermione’ and Hermione was like ‘No, I’m a lizard Ronald’ and then LH had put like ‘she turned into a lizard and scuttled away’

Mod H: Yeah.

Mod R: And I was like, that’s like, there’s a funny gag in there but the way you put it-

Mod H: Yeah, and I posted that thinking ‘there’s something funnier in here but I just can’t unlock it’?

Mod R: Yeah, so before it posted, when it was in the queue, I edited it to say like ‘No Ronald I’m a Weasley [she meant lizard]’ and then ‘blinks sideways’. Like, because like that’s what lizards do, and that’s way funnier!

Mod H: Some of the posts come out of conversations we’ve had and I’ve worded them, that’s-

Mod R: Pretty much.

Mod H: There’s my counter-example. Like, you’ve come up with an idea when we’ve been talking-

Mod R: Like I often, we’re often just talking about Harry Potter, and then you’ll be like ‘oh shit that’s good’ and then type that down.

Mod H: Yeah, and I put it into words, and actually make it into a post, so-

Mod R: Yeah, it really is a teamwork thing.

Mod H: Yeah, it’s a team effort! Moreso than we think it is, sometimes, I think.

Mod R: whimsicalfangirlthings said, ‘How do you like your macaroni and cheese?’ Like, together.

Mod H: Cooked.

Mod R: Like, cooked.

Mod H: In a microwave, usually.

Mod R: Like, no offense whimsicalfangirlthings.tumblr.com, are there many ways to have macaroni and cheese?

Mod H: If there are, I don’t know them.

Mod R: Like, in my mouth, that’s where I like to have…I really like-Mac and cheese is maybe one of my favourite pastas. Anonymous asks, ‘How many apples does Draco eat a day?’ I don’t fucking know!

Mod H: What-what kind of?

Mod R: I know that’s a reference to like, the gif where he’s eating the apple.

Mod H: Yeah.

Mod R: I don’t know! What does that mean, like-ok, I. Here’s, you want a funny answer? Sixty nine. There you go. Jesus Christ.

Mod H: Is that a funny answer?

Mod R: ig-ign…

Mod H: ignativs-weasley, that’s Ignatius spelled with a v instead of a u, dash Weasley-

Mod R: .tumblr.com

Mod H: Says ‘Hey! Ignativs here. I was wondering, why 1965? Your bio, I mean? Thanks. #accio100k’

Mod R: Um.

Mod H: This is-this is a long-held secret. It’s not really a secret!

Mod R: Nah, people have worked it out before.

Mod H: Many people have worked it out.

Mod R: People have asked us this, people have sent in ‘oh, I get it’, um, it’s when JK Rowling was born. Which is a bit-a bit of a nod, just to like say actually, actually we’re JK Rowling. Which is not true, we’re not actually.

Mod H: We’re-we’re not.

Mod R: ‘Which Harry Potter character(s) would you most like to have a slumber party with?’

Mod H: I mean, I think it’d be really fun to have a slumber party with Dumbledore?

Mod R: Yes, my man!

Mod H: But that would go places.

Mod R: That’d go places.

Mod H: That’d go weird places, and probably end up in death.

Mod R: The places it’d go would be like, like Voldemort Cave.

Mod H: But uh, I wouldn’t like to have a slumber party with but I’d like to have a drink with Aberforth. That’d be quite fun.

Mod R: Well no ‘cos-he’d end up fucking a goat at the slumber party. I always said Ah-ber-forth, by the way.

Mod H: Ah-ber-forth, Ay-ber-forth, I go back and forth. Eyyyyyyy.

Mod R: Eyyyyyyyy. Um, Slughorn, by the way.

Mod H: Slughorn! Slughorn-

Mod R: Because like, he does such good midnight parties!

Mod H: Let’s just have a professor party! Snape leaves, get McGonagall in here-

Mod R: Snape’s dead.

Mod H: Yeah, Snape’s dead, get McGonagall in here-

Mod R: No, I’m too scared of McGonagall.

Mod H: Ah, I think-

Mod R: I’m too scared and sexually intimidated by Minerva McGonagall.

Mod H: Ok, fair, fair. Flitwick! Flitwick would be a riot.

Mod R: Luna, by the way.

Mod H: Luna, yeah.

Mod R: And the Weasley twins.

Mod H: The Weasleys. Just all of them.

Mod R: All of them…apart from Percy, that wanker.

Mod H: I didn’t-what’s a Percy?

Mod R: Yeah, who’s Percy?

Mod H: Apologies to all Per-

Mod R: [gasp] Arthur Weasley! Because we’re Muggles, he’d love-

Mod H: That’d be really cute!

Mod R: [high voice] ‘What the fuck’s a lightbulb?’

Mod H: Let’s have a slumber party with Dobby.

Mod R: No, that’d be shit. Have you seen the one time Harry’s been asleep, and Dobby’s been there? It was Chamber of Secrets, and it was awful.

Mod H. nuevojesus-blog said, ‘What is your favourite HP book and film?’

Mod R: You go yours, I’m not sure about mine.

Mod H: Mine would be Order of the Phoenix for book, and Prisoner of Azkaban for film.

Mod R: Prisoner of Azkaban definitely for film, um, despite the fact that it misses out some of the important details, it’s definitely one of the better directed in my opinion.

Mod H: Well, I think it was definitely the last one before the books were getting far too long to adapt.

Mod R: Yeah. No offense, but the first three movies are the best.

Mod H: Yeah, the first-well, I mean, it’s-they’re different types of movies.

Mod R: And the last two are both far too long and too short, simultaneously.

Mod H: Yeah, I get what you mean by that.

Mod R: Like they put in too much stuff that they don’t need in, and they keep out too much stuff that they do need in, like a proper goodbye to the Dursleys wasn’t in. But Harry and Hermione dancing while Ron fucked off was in there.

Mod H: Yeah, like, they really left out some things that they should have had in and put in a lot of things that weren’t necessary?

Mod R: Which might be to do with the way that-I feel like the directors changed over?

Mod H: The directors did change from the first three to-

Mod R: Really. ordinarylittleme.tumblr.com asked ‘Who are you guys, also what made you decide to make this blog?’ So we’ve also sort of answered one of these, so, ‘who are you guys’, we’ve also again sort of answered. ‘What made you decide to make this blog?’ Um, for once, I had one of my wild ideas. The relationship that we have is very much-you’ll be asleep at like, to be fair at like eleven pm, okay? I used to phone LH up in the middle of the night saying ‘I’ve got this brilliant idea!’ And then every time, of course, they’d be like ‘no, that’s an awful idea.’

Mod H: To be fair, you haven’t heard some of the ideas!

Mod R: Yeah, they’re pretty bad. But this time, I was like ‘you know those jokes that we’ve been sending each other today, the Harry Potter jokes, why don’t we do a blog? Like, we could get popular!’

Mod H: And I, of course, being the practical one, I was like ‘no, that’s a terrible idea, we should never do that’

Mod R: I don’t think you were like that though, I feel like for most of the things you were like ‘uuuuh maybe’. But I think for this one you were like ‘actually, that sounds like a cool idea!’

Mod H: Well, I’m always more reluctant about a lot of these things.

Mod R: Yeah, that’s true.

Mod H: Like, I’ll admit that. Then, we just sort of did it. Like, we saved the url, after a little bit of haggling over what exactly that would be – I think whatever is our blog description, I think ‘Mischief managed’, mischief something, I can’t remember what it is, like that was gonna be the url for a bit, but then we decided on accio-shitpost, which was a good move.

Mod R: Right.

Mod H: Shitpost managed, that was what-that was what we were gonna-

Mod R: It was gonna be that for a while.

Mod H: I think that was my suggestion, and yours was accio-shitpost, and we went with accio-shitpost. So we compromised on that, and I think that was the better idea. Then, you know, we spent about a day setting up the theme.

Mod R: Yeah.

Mod H: And then we made it live! We just went for it! And the rest, as they say, is history.

Mod R: drearncatcher37.tumblr.com, that’s ‘dreamcatcher’ with an rn as people often do-

Mod H: So it’s like drearncatcher, technically.

Mod R: Yeah, says, ‘I have a question for the podcast. Why.’

Mod H: Good question.

Mod R: Yeah, yeah, that’s a good question.

Mod H: Good question.

Mod R: Because we’ve got nothing better to do, and we-okay, that’s a lie, we have so many things better to do, we honestly do. Anonymous said, ‘(You're my favorite blog)’ in brackets, thank-

Mod H: Thank you.

Mod R: sciencekilledmypurrmaids.tumblr.com said-

Mod H: ‘CHEESE?’

Mod R: Cheese. Um, I wanna interpret this as ‘What’s your favourite cheese?’, so – what’s your favourite cheese?

Mod H: I don’t-I don’t have a favourite cheese, I’m not a cheese connoisseur-

Mod R: I like all cheeses.

Mod H: I mostly just have cheddar cheese.

Mod R: Yeah, I mostly just have cheddar cheese.

Mod H: Or like Lancashire cheeses.

Mod R: Oh, yeah, ‘cos you’re from Lanc!

Mod H: I’m from Lancs.

Mod R: You’re a Lancer.

Mod H: That’s not-that’s not what we call it. Also fun fact! Lancashire/Yorkshire is where Neville Longbottom is supposed to be from.

Mod R: Really?

Mod H: Yeah, cos-

Mod R: He’s got-he’s got a northern accent in the movie, doesn’t he?

Mod H: In his hilariously abusive childhood, as well, he mentions getting dropped off Blackpool Pier, so-

Mod R: And of course…Harry mentions…train stations that I’ve been to.

Mod H: I still think that’s so ridiculously redundant, having to go all the way down to King’s Cross and then all the way back up to Scotland.

Mod R: Yeah, like-why don’t you just fucking Floo Powder it, you know?

Mod H: What if you already live in Scotland?

Mod R: Yeah, what does Minerva do?

Mod H: I mean, I assume Minerva just kind of stays there.

Mod R: Yeah.

Mod H: Although I think that is at least partially based on the childhood assumptions that teachers live at school. But in Hogwarts’ case it might actually be true! Anonymous asks, ‘'Tbh I legit expected you guys to be a shitpost account where literally nothing makes sense and it's the most ridiculous thing ever but half the things you post make Sense and ????'

Mod R: Yeah, um-the reason behind this is that anybody – and people have literally made robots to do this – can be like ‘the Marauders Map but it has a big dick’, and like-

Mod H: And we do make posts sometimes like that, that’re just like words and nonsense, but-

Mod R: But like, it loses its charm pretty quickly.

Mod H: Yeah, I-I think part of the reason we’ve had as much staying power as we’ve had is because we don’t actually make-

Mod R: We’re not actually shitposts.

Mod H: We make jokes, we make observations, like some of our posts…

Mod R: It’s observational humour.

Mod H: But some of our posts are just like, things we wanna talk about.

Mod R: What if Dobby had a big dick, you know.

Mod H: And sadposts. I-I do get a lot of joy out of making sadposts, I think most if not all of them have been mine.

Mod R: Yeah, we drain the happiness out of people.

Mod H: I-I enjoy this. I enjoy your suffering. I’m sorry.

Mod R: fangirlsneedmorebooks.tumblr.com says, 'What would you do if you were confronted by a hippogriff/dragon combo?' Poo myself.

Mod H: Probably die.

Mod R: Yeah, like, die. I’m not a wizard, I’m a muggle.

Mod H: Probably get killed by it.

Mod R: Yeah, I would die. fictionale934.tumblr.com said, 'When did you start this blog?'

Mod H: July the 6th.

Mod R: We started with my first post, ‘I name you after the two bravest men who tried to eat me, Aragog Student Loans’

Mod H: That’s still-I’m so glad we picked that one for the first one.

Mod R: And then your first one, which is my favourite one of yours ever.

Mod H: ‘Ah yes. Werewolf Werewolf and his boyfriend, Dog.’

Mod R: 'Other than this blog, what's the biggest way HP has impacted you all?', asks ronweasleywrites.tumblr.com.

Mod H: That’s an interesting question, actually.

Mod R: And also I’m gonna-I’m gonna have a bit of a segue here, people seem to think a lot of people run this blog?

Mod H: Yeah! They seem to think either there’s a lot of people-

Mod R: There’s two and a half.

Mod H: Or like one person. There’s two of us, who are the main-Mod K, who is a friend of mine, who I know in real life, and Roxie only knows from the internet-you’ve met, you’ve met once.

Mod R: The moniker ‘Mod K’ has always pissed me off, because we chose Mod R and Mod H because H and R-so like my first name begins with R, Roxie, and your last name which we’re not gonna say begins with H.

Mod H: Yeah.

Mod R: And also I’m in Ravenclaw, you’re in Hufflepuff. There isn’t a house that begins with a K!

Mod H: I think-that’s, that’s part of the rationale, though, because she’s not a main mod, she doesn’t get a main mod name.

Mod R: That’s true.

Mod H: She’s also a Slytherin, fyi.

Mod R: Is she?

Mod H: Yeah.

Mod R: Well, that makes sense.

Mod H: But um, what’s the biggest way HP has impacted us?

Mod R: Um.

Mod H: You have a good one for this, so I’ll let you go first.

Mod R: So, um, I’m autistic, a lot of you know this. I’m very very involved with autism advocacy and autism rights. I never really found many characters to relate to as a child? And, upon rereading Order of the Phoenix for the first time as an adult-because usually I just read my favourite ones, and Order of the Phoenix isn’t really my favourite book, and it’s quite long, and I’ve got a really bad attention span, so I never get through it. But this one time, I was reading it, and I got to the bit where Luna was first introduced, and just the way she was described was very similar to my experiences as an autistic teenage girl, and I just started crying and crying because for the first time I’ve seen a character who was like me. And I’ve met other people who’ve said the exact same thing about when they saw Luna in Harry Potter. And I think that’s the way it’s impacted me the most apart from, like, my wallet.

Mod H: Yeah.

Mod R: Like, I’ve bought a lot of Harry Potter merch.

Mod H: For me, I think, one of the biggest ways Harry Potter impacted me was-when I first came to secondary school…because I am a very nerdy, introverted person, I don’t really-I’m not good at like talking to people and making friends and stuff, and…I can’t remember exactly how it happened, but it definitely helped me bond with Megan. I’ve been friends with her for like ten years plus, now, and that was one of the things that we definitely built our friendship on, being a couple of dorks who really liked Harry Potter a lot, so like that’s a nice thing it’s done for me. sadie-bug82, that’s sadie dash bug 82, asks ‘What’s your favourite book and how many times have you read it?’

Mod R: Fuck if I know.

Mod H: I mean, is this like Harry Potter book?

Mod R: I don’t think it’s Harry Potter book.

Mod H: Or book forever?

Mod R: I’ve definitely listened to – because again, I’ve got a bad attention span – I’ve definitely listened to the audiobook of Philosopher’s Stone, which isn’t my favourite book, like a dozen times maybe. And my favourite book would probably be Prisoner of Azkaban, which I’ve listened to maybe five or six separate times.

Mod H: What about your favourite non-HP book?

Mod R: Fuck if I know, though. I really like Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but I haven’t read that in years.

Mod H: I mean, for me, as I’ve already said, Order of the Phoenix is my favourite Harry Potter book. My favourite non-Harry Potter book?

Mod R: The Book Thief.

Mod H: The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak.

Mod R: I knew that one!

Mod H: We talked about it the other day. If you have the time, and access to a copy-

Mod R: Don’t watch the movie.

Mod H: Don’t watch the movie. The movie’s not a good adaptation. Go read the book, because it’s amazing and it changed my life, I swear to God.

Mod R: ‘I have so many questions’ says – what, what?

Mod H: takes-one-to-no-one-cares, with dashes between each word.

Mod R: Ah, right. I get it, I get it. Takes one to no one cares, that’s clever. 'I have so many questions! I'd love to know how y'all’ [in American accent] ‘I’d love to know how y’all met! J’

Mod H: How-how did we meet?

Mod R: Um…

Mod H: Let’s…

Mod R: We’re actually at the place we met.

Mod H: Yeah, this is…

Mod R: Four year anniversary.

Mod H: Four year anniversary, high five.

[High five noise.]

Mod H: We met…in this place, and for those of you who are-

Mod R: I don’t really wanna say what it is, because it’s like a bit personal.

Mod H: Yeah, but for those of you who are not listening in at the window right now, it’s like an event that we went to a couple of times.

Mod R: Yeah, it’s like-it’s not like a convention or anything, it’s nothing embarrassing, it’s just a bit personal.

Mod H: Yeah, we’d just rather not go into it.

Mod R: We met, because, um, a girl who I’d met the year before, who I was in a relationship with for a year, she’d just broken up with me, because she didn’t feel it was right, and I was like ‘yeah that’s fair’, but I was still very sad about it, you know, and I saw somebody with a Homestuck t-shirt across the room.

Mod H: And that person…was Albert Einstein. Funnily enough that was actually the second time that had happened within like ten minutes, cos – this is the way I tell the story – I was just kinda hanging round waiting for the thing we were at to start and two girls came over to me like ‘hey, I like your t-shirt’, you know, ‘is that a Homestuck thing?’ and we got chatting, and that wasn’t Roxie, and then another couple came along and that was Roxie, and we have been talking ever since, basically.

Mod R: We had a pun-off.

Mod H: We had a pun-off, that cemented our relationship. I have a vivid memory of sitting in a restaurant with my family, texting you bad puns under the table.

Mod R: 'Hope I'm not being annoying & clogging up your asks' You're not, anonymous. 'But what are your opinions on the drama of OoTP with Molly and Sirius duking it out on 'Who is the Less Problematic Replacement Parent for Harry?' Got those receipts. ‘I'm personally on Team Molly Needs To Chill, but my friends are on Team Sirius Is Literally A Criminal Who Thinks Harry Is James.' Okay so, the criminal bit isn’t so bad because, by definition, Molly is also a criminal.

Mod H: Also like Sirius was imprisoned for a crime he literally did not commit, like we know this as a fact.

Mod R: Molly is married to somebody who was infiltrating the government. That’s a fact. And she has children who are infiltrating the government-

Mod H: She was also, herself, involved in a resistance movement against the government, like, they’re criminals the same.

Mod R: And like even before Deathly Hallows this is the case.

Mod H: Yeah, yeah.

Mod R: But the issue is Sirius does think Harry is James. The problem with their relationship is both Harry and Sirius are using each other as a replacement for James.

Mod H: Yeah, absolutely. And like in that situation, Sirius cannot encourage Harry to be like James. Sirius shouldn’t encourage Harry to be reckless, because he in some-because he is in some genuinely dangerous situations.

Mod R: And don’t get me wrong-not only, when we’re saying James we don’t just mean Dad James, as a replacement for Dad James, we mean as a replacement of the cool lad James that Harry would have wanted to be friends with.

Mod H: Because like-

Mod R: However, right, Harry is using Molly as a replacement for Lily, or James, like gender doesn’t matter I guess-

Mod H: Generally parents.

Mod R: Here’s the thing – Molly isn’t using Harry as a replacement for a dead child or Percy or anything, even though Percy does leave, she’s just a mum, and she feels-she has a profound motherhood for Harry.

Mod H: I mean, I think my personal opinion lies somewhere between the two because like-

Mod R: Oh sure.

Mod H: All of the things we’ve said, but in the context of that specific scene, Molly was withholding information from Harry that was relevant to him, and it’s not like that’s ever been a problem in Harry’s past before, am I right?

Mod R: And Molly’s done some shitty things before to Hermione, in er Goblet of Fire-

Mod H: Personally I really like that scene, just for showing like the depth of Molly.

Mod R: Everyone sins, yeah, she’s a very deeply written character.

Mod H: None of these people are perfect, like her heart’s in the right place, she’s just sometimes overprotective.

Mod R: And same for Sirius! But-

Mod H: The other way.

Mod R: Even that, but-he’s missing out on this context of Harry’s life, and Molly said this, like this obviously isn’t Sirius’ fault but, and the ways she said it kind of implied that it was, but Molly saw the later years of Harry’s life. Sirius was introduced very late into Harry’s life.

Mod H: Sirius has known Harry for two years at this point, Molly’s known him since basically the start of when we first see him, at age 11.

Mod R: Like, as far as the wizarding world is concerned, yeah.

Mod H: And that does make a difference, and that’s not Sirius’ fault obviously.

Mod R: And of course Sirius has technically known Harry longer, but it’s not the same.

Mod H: I also think the problem, as well, is that Sirius is still in that mindset he was in when he was like twenty one. Because he’s lost all of these years to Azkaban and he basically comes out and there’s James 2.0. So naturally he goes back to the way he was acting.

Mod R: Like he comes out and there’s this kid who looks exactly like the boy who died, his best friend who died, and probably the man he loved who died. Give me that story instead of Snape loving Lily, by the way, give me that!

Mod H: JK Rowling! But yeah.

Mod R: Yeah.

Mod H: But thanks for that question, anon, because that was really interesting to talk about.

Mod R: Now, here’s a question responding to one of our posts, anonymous asked, ‘But was there anything specifically saying Voldemort /wasn't/ wearing a party hat?’ Uh…

Mod H: Technically no.

Mod R: There probably is actually.

Mod H: Yeah. ‘The light glimmered off his shiny bald head’.

Mod R: Yeah, exactly, lines like that, and also he can’t wear it under Quirrell’s turban.

Mod H: Oh. What if Quirrell was wearing a party hat, like at Christmas?

Mod R: Well it wouldn’t be a party hat, it’d be a Christmas hat.

Mod H: Okay. Like, Dumbledore’s birthday party-

Mod R: Also, bringing in some very very-

Mod H: Oh, here we go.

Mod R: Minute lore of Harry Potter – they don’t have Christmas cracker crowns in the wizarding world-

Mod H: That’s true, that’s true.

Mod R: They have regular hats that come out of crackers. And actual mice and stuff, and explosions.

Mod H: But they could’ve-I really wish they’d brought that in the movies, to be honest.

Mod R: Oh, fuuuuuuuck.

Mod H: That scene would’ve been so good.

Mod R: So goooood! antifacistmutsuki says, 'what are yall hogwarts and ilvermorny houses and wands' Hogwarts are Ravenclaw.

Mod H: And Hufflepuff.

Mod R: And Ilvermorny, fuck off I don’t care.

Mod H: I remember I got the Hufflepuff of Ilvermorny.

Mod R: I was like-I was really interested and then I saw the name and was like, I don’t care anymore. Thunderbird, that’s what I remember.

Mod H: I can’t remember my wand. I think mine was laurel?

Mod R: kimpossibleandme said 'Can I become a mod on here?' No. Sorry. We don’t take admissions. We don’t take submissions-we don’t even take submissions, you can’t be a moderator.

Mod H: We’ve made it a policy from the start that we only post posts that we make ourselves, or sometimes that our close personal friends do. It’s not really-it’s not anything against you.

Mod R: And when we say close personal friends, we’re not even saying favouritism, it’s like someone’s come up to us and said ‘hey, here’s a thing’ and then we’re like ‘can I use that as a shitpost’.

Mod H: Yeah, often that is the case, or like we’re talking about it or something like that.

Mod R: So no, you can’t be a mod on here. Sorry. Uh. Anonymous said, ‘I like my gilrs’ not girls, gilrs ‘how I like my Dumbledore. Headmasters.' Okay! Let’s leave.

Mod H: Let’s leave.

Mod R: I didn’t need to know that. Um, ihazgiantcheezburga.tumblr.com, that’s haz with a z, cheez c-h-e-e-z, b-u-r-g-a, ‘Draco Malfoy was a Mary Sue.’ No he wasn’t.

Mod H: No, not really.

Mod R: That’s like, done.

Mod H: Not at all, actually.

Mod R: Here’s your Harry Potter advice segment! ‘Draco Malfoy was a Mary Sue’ No, he wasn’t.

Mod H: No.

Mod R: He had many character flaws. He was incredibly rich…Harry Potter was a Mary Sue, absolutely.

Mod H: I mean, the concept of a Mary Sue-

Mod R: Is bullshit, it was just misogyny, wasn’t it. It was just, here’s a female character that I don’t like because she’s got so many-

Mod H: Well, no.

Mod R: People say that about Rey from Star Wars, and what they mean is that she’s as good at the Force as Luke was.

Mod H: The-the original meaning of Mary Sue though was a fanfic character who was impossibly perfect and probably dating Captain Kirk, or whatever.

Mod R: Me too.

Mod H: And that slowly just sort of became a character who I think is too perfect regardless fo anything-

Mod R: Well, Harry is a bit too perfect, he’s got a lot of character-

Mod H: He’s got a lot of flaws, like-

Mod R: He’s got a lot of those things that people in fanfics give them, like you don’t even need to give Harry an immense fortune for your, like, Bastard King fic, because he’s already got that, you know, he’s already got-

Mod H: Where he’s a secret Pureblood king, well…

Mod R: pixycaterino says, ‘Have y’all’ [bad American accent] ‘Have yall ever cosplayed? oh anD WHAT ARE YOUR WANDS’ We can’t do the wands one. I don’t know!

Mod H: We…yeah.

Mod R: Like, everyone’s like ‘what are your wands’, it’s not a question like ‘what’s your MBTI type’ or ‘what house are you in’.

Mod H: ‘What sign are you.’

Mod R: Or like ‘What’s your God Tier’ in Homestuck, or like what Pokemon Go team you’re on. It’s not like that, it’s like what piece of fucking wood do you use to cast magic, oh wait you don’t because you’re not a fucking wizard and you don’t have one of those. Like, Houses are sorted into-like, I’m sorry, I’m really sorry to whoever asked this, I’m not angry at you, I promise. But like people ask this question, and I don’t get it because there isn’t any like basis – there might be, like, subtext but there is no basis like personality and intellectual traits on what kind of wand you get. There isn’t houses-so like, if you’re very loyal, chances are you’re a Hufflepuff, if you’re very friendly, you’re loyal, you stick true to your friends, you’re probably a Hufflepuff.

Mod H: Yeah.

Mod R: If you’re very brave, you’re courageous, you like justice a lot then you’re probably a Gryffindor. If you think things through, and you might not be smart but you’re like, you spend a lot of time thinking about things-

Mod H: Not like intellectual but you’re like wise, logical.

Mod R: Yeah, like you think things through, or you place a lot of emphasis on waiting things out then you’re probably a Ravenclaw, and if you’re ambitious, and like maybe you put the team before the person, then maybe you’re a Slytherin, you know.

Mod H: Yeah.

Mod R: But for wands it’s just like ‘oh like I’m good at Transfiguration’.

Mod H: Like me and my friend both did the wand test, and we got almost identical results because we’re about the same height, age…

Mod R: Yeah, exactly.

Mod H: Physical appearance…it is pretty much a randomly generated thing, it’s not like deeply based. Like you could argue that the Hogwarts house quiz is based on actual stuff, but-

Mod R: I’m sure there’s some subtext to what wands characters get, like red wood means something in-

Mod H: Well are in characters, but the thing is like if you use the Pottermore-

Mod R: In the movies, in the movies, Dumbledore-uh, Voldemort’s looks like its bone. And of course that’s because he’s a deadly character, he’s very spooky, but like I don’t have that, I’m not an important character in the Harry Potter universe.

Mod H: Yeah, that’s the movie characters.

Mod R: I don’t have an arc.

Mod H: Like, the Pottermore wand test is just-

Mod R: How tall are you, what hand do you use, how many fingers do you have on your right foot.

Mod H: What?

Mod R: Yeah.

Mod H: As to the other, ‘have y’all ever cosplayed’…

Mod R: Yeah.

Mod H: Yes. We have.

Mod R: I’ve cosplayed as…I mean, I wore Ravenclaw robes last time I went to a convention. Other than that, I’ve cosplayed Chell from Portal, Roxie Lalonde…who have you cosplayed?

Mod H: I’ve cosplayed Jane Crocker from Homestuck.

Mod R: That was by accident, wasn’t it?

Mod H: No, I did it deliberately once. Booker DeWitt from Bioshock-

Mod R: That was good.

Mod H: And Doctor Linksano from Atop the Fourth Wall, which-

Mod R: Yeah, well that’s awful, that’s awful.

Mod H: For anyone in our audience who knows what that is…

Mod R: Hit me up.

Mod H: Hit me up. Cos, guys. Guys.

Mod R: brighterthantherain said 'I'd love to see some the MBTI types as x posts' Well, here’s the thing. No?

Mod H: No.

Mod R: Like, I’m sorry, we don’t mean to be rude.

Mod H: That takes a lot of work, that’s the only thing as well.

Mod R: If we sound rude, we’re just trying to be funny, and honestly we’re sorry if we offend people. Um, but like, it takes a lot of work-I don’t really understand all of the MTBI types.

Mod H: No.

Mod R: And also people are more likely to call you out for that kind of thing?

Mod H: Yeah.

Mod R: People will be like ‘oh you don’t understand the MBTI things’ like no I don’t! I didn’t major in Psychology!

Mod H: Like, that would take a lot of time and effort and dedication just for one post, which we don’t currently have, or-and we definitely don’t have the motivation to do all that research.

Mod R: ‘Surprise beautiful person!’ says anonymous. ‘Once you get this, you must put it into at least 8 people’s asks (anonymously) who deserve it. If you break the chain, nothing bad will happen, but it’s nice to know that someone thinks you’re beautiful inside and out. Help spread anon love, not hate! Love you. <3’ Thank you! We appreciate these-we never pass them on.

Mod H: We don’t pass them on.

Mod R: I never pass on these.

Mod H: Yeah, my days of passing on stuff like this are long gone.

Mod R: I’ve never done them.

Mod H: I did a while back.

Mod R: Nuh uh. Um, this is an interesting question, anonymous said – and they’re asking this as if we’re some like, we’re the figurehead of Harry Potter, which is really nice.

Mod H: Like we have any say in it.

Mod R: We’re JK Rowling. Anonymous said, ‘Idk if you can answer this but, can exist a three headed dog's patronus?’ Yes, probably.

Mod H: Probably.

Mod R: Somebody-I read on the wiki somewhere that somebody I know historically had a giant as their patronus.

Mod H: Yeah.

Mod R: So like, a three headed dog isn’t that unlikely. Like, wolves can be. A werewolf can be.

Mod H: Like, a three headed dog is a creature in the Harry Potter universe.

Mod R: Anonymous said, ‘are you a feminist?’ Actually, I hate women. I fucking hate them. No, we’re feminists, yeah.

Mod H: Yeah, I-I think we’d identify that way.

Mod R: Pretty much. If anything I wouldn’t want-the only reason I wouldn’t want to identify as the label ‘feminist’ is because we have some views so far left wing that even feminists often disagree with them. And that’s a particular thing, like because I’m a trans woman, there’s a whole huge sect of feminists – and I’m not generalising – there is a huge group of feminists who exclude trans women called trans exclusionary feminists, there’s a bunch of transmisogynistic feminists who think trans women don’t deserve a place in feminism or anywhere belonging to women. Which is one of the only reasons we wouldn’t want to label ourselves feminists. But if someone was like ‘oh feminism’s about this, like, only these kind of people can be feminists’, I’d be like, ‘I’m a feminist and that’s wrong.’ Like I use that label sparingly, but when I need it. And I don’t not use it because I’m embarrassed, because I tote my beliefs strongly.

Mod H: Yeah.

Mod R: freaki, with an I as in f-r-e-a-k-i, freakithechaos said ‘uh.. hello! *waves awkwardly*’ That’s cute. ‘uhm.. I'm not sure if this was discussed already but, why doesn't Umbridge love McGonagall? I mean, Umbridge LOVES cats and McGonagall's animagus is a cat ... so she basically IS a cat, isn't she? o.o’

Mod H: I mean, that’s not quite how that works.

Mod R: That’s not really how that works.

Mod H: I mean, cos Umbridge represents all McGonagall hates-

Mod R: Because Umbridge isn’t just a furry!

Mod H: And vice versa.

Mod R: McGonagall’s meant to be Umbridge’s foil, she was portrayed as that.

Mod H: Or, well, the other way round, because Umbridge was introduced later, but you know.

Mod R: Well, like, I mean, as the villain.

Mod H: Yeah, I know what you mean.

Mod R: Like, Dumbledore is not Umbridge’s foil – I think narratively, that’s one of the reasons they get Dumbledore out of the picture?

Mod H: Umbridge is basically evil mirrorverse McGonagall, like-

Mod R: Yeah, yeah.

Mod H: McGonagall gone completely wrong.

Mod R: And this is literally true in the Cursed Child, like, Cursed Child spoilers coming up here.

Mod H: That is quite interesting.

Mod R: In Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Minerva McGonagall is the headmistress of Hogwarts, but in – again, spoilers coming up so like skip forward – but in the alternate universe, Umbridge is the headmistress, and she is, like, she has very little regard for but great interest in Scorpius, whilst the opposite is true for McGonagall, where she actually goes out of her way to not be interested in order to maintain Albus and Scorpius’ relationship, mainly because she’s seen generations of Potters falling in love and not getting their way. Um, anonymous said, ‘I always see yall’ [American accent] ‘using ur powers of being a popular blog with lots of followers’ I always do that with y’all, by the way, I’m not just doing that for a random reason, ‘and high visibility for good. thanks A+ keep up the good work’

Mod H: Thank you!

Mod R: Thank you, we really appreciate it.

Mod H: We were a bit iffy at first, about like starting to post more politics and signal boosts and donations and stuff, initially at least, but we basically decided that we’ve got a lot of followers, we can’t really not. We’ve got an obligation to, in this political climate.

Mod R: Another thing is – we get a lot of questions like this a lot, and we don’t answer them, and it’s not because we don’t like them. We love them.

Mod H: Yeah. They fuel us!

Mod R: Yeah. One, we don’t want to tote how great people we are. It’s quite narcissistic to be like-cos we get plenty of people who are like ‘fuck you’ as well.

Mod H: Yeah.

Mod R: Like, it’s not often, but there are people, but like whatever, you’re you, I don’t care. But like one, we don’t want to clog it up with that. Two, we want to keep relatively interesting asks being put out, compared to like ‘ah you’re great!’ ‘ah you’re great!’, again which is a bit narcissistic.

Mod H: Usually, the asks we answer are like admin-related, like we’re introducing a new tag or whatever, or interesting questions, or occasionally like funny things that pique our interest.

Mod R: Yeah, and um the third reason is, um, we like looking at them!

Mod H: Yeah!

Mod R: Like, our inbox doesn’t fill that fast, we don’t get dozens of asks a day, we get a couple-

Mod H: We get a fair amount a week, I’d say.

Mod R: We get five a week at least.

Mod H: Yeah, about that, on average.

Mod R: But-but when stuff happens, we get dozens.

Mod H: Yeah, when we ask for asks or when it’s obvious that we’re answering them we get quite a few.

Mod R: Yeah, yeah, so like we like seeing them! So when we refresh our inbox, if there’s nothing new in there, we get to see that one again and that’s nice. 'Someday,' says anonymous, 'I would like to know who's ran this blog and their personal tumblrs.' Too bad.

Mod H: We’re telling you nothing about us!

Mod R: I might eventually reveal mine, Mod H is not so keen.

Mod H: I don’t really wanna reveal my personal tumblr just cos, like-some people who follow me can probably guess because I make it quite obvious on my personal. But there’s about like five people I actually know on there.

Mod R: Mine’s pretty easy to work out, if you’ve got all the clues, which-all the clues are on the blog, if you go back far enough and look through all the tags…

Mod H: I think if you specifically went sleuthing through the blog to find out who we were, you probably could find that, with a bit of-

Mod R: And probably like, our close friends as well, from the beginning.

Mod H: Yeah, like our close friends and people we know.

Mod R: Luckily, a lot of the first posts – this wasn’t an intentional effort, but we’ve reblogged them in events and stuff, ‘hey look here’s our first post’ and we’ve washed out all the original reblogs which would have been to ours and our friend’s blogs, to promote the blog. Anonymous said ‘ALEXANDER HAMILTON!’ I don’t understand that.

Mod H: I probably made-I’m the one who’s seen Hamilton – well not seen it, I’ve listened to it.

Mod R: You’re going to see it.

Mod H: I’m going to see it!

Mod R: Lucky shit.

Mod H: I’m quite excited about that! I got really lucky with that.

Mod R: Okay, so, anonymous said ‘They do. It’s called Hogsmeade.’ So, like, I’m sure this was a response to a post, but here’s the thing – we don’t know what post this was a response to because we make ten a day.

Mod H: And by the time your ask has come in, it’s like a day later at least.

Mod R: From context of another ask, I think it’s–did we have a Starbucks, that Starbucks hasn’t opened a-

Mod H: Possibly. It might have been something along those lines, I can’t remember. I know that is a specific one, but I can’t remember what it was.

Mod R: Because someone asked us another one about magical instant coffee. Shout out to you, authoraiya. 'Which ships do u ship? like either canon or noncanon xx' Uh, all of them.

Mod H: Well, not all of them.

Mod R: Scorbus, sort of, but like also I don’t like shipping kids. Like I wish that they would-

Mod H: In a very-

Mod R: Have gotten together. I wish that Credence would have gotten a boyfriend. Because I think he was coded gay in Fantastic Beasts.

Mod H: I mean for me, erm, I don’t really ship generally. I ship Wolfstar kind of, Scorbus kind of-

Mod R: Wolfstar-well, I think I ship Wolfstar, a lot.

Mod H: Ginny and Luna.

Mod R: So that’s all the asks that we got, and a couple more.

Mod H: And a few more that we found from the archive.

Mod R: I’m gonna, just like the McElroys, I’m gonna leave you with another ask. Anonymous says, ‘What’s with y’all and micropigs though?’

Mod H: And with that, we’re out.