Counter point: I like to collect gift wrappers so no, they're not useless

here’s a hot take: giftwrap is dumb, 95% of the time you can just hand someone the thing and accomplish the same task. Society has conditioned us to love wrapping shit up for no reason, probably by gift wrap industry people.

Lmao i love how you missed the entire point of my post

D-DAY ANNIVERSARY

“You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you…” With these words, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower issued the “Order of the Day” just before the 1944 Allied assault on Normandy Beach. It’s been 80 years since that historic day, and less than one percent of Americans who served in WWII are still alive. However, the impact of their service and sacrifice will live on forever.

Code named Operation Overlord, planning for D-Day began after France fell to the Nazis in 1940. It involved Allies from several countries and was the largest amphibious invasion in military history. As H-Hour approached (5:30 a.m. local time) on June 6, 1944, demolition teams had already blasted out underwater obstacles planted by German forces. Rangers were already scaling the cliffs to knock out coastal guns, and American and British airborne divisions had been dropped in hedgerows behind the beaches overnight. Soon, the first waves of Infantry would hit the beach.

Leonard T. Schroeder, Jr. served in the 2nd Battalion, 8th Infantry, Fourth Division, where he was the commanding officer of Company F. 

He has the distinction of being the first man ashore at Utah Beach, the first beachhead, landing fewer than 60 seconds after H-Hour. Recalling the day, Schroeder said that Allied aircraft had bombed the beach heavily, creating craters that could be used as cover. Some of those craters were offshore and hidden by water. When Schroeder’s landing craft pulled ashore, he jumped off and into a water-filled crater six feet deep. He came up sputtering and struggled to rush ashore. Working his way up the beach, he was wounded by shrapnel but continued to fight. He commanded his company for three hours before collapsing into unconsciousness. He woke up at an aid station and was later evacuated to England. Schroeder received the Silver Star.

Pvt. Carlton W. Barrett served in the 18th Infantry, 1st Infantry Division and participated in the Normandy Invasion. His unit was in the third wave of Allied soldiers to come ashore at Omaha Beach, landing at about 10:00 a.m. Germans had planted mines on the beach about a foot apart, and the beach was strewn with bodies of soldiers. Barrett landed under heavy enemy fire, wading through neck-deep water. He noticed fellow soldiers around him floundering in the water and rushed to save them from drowning. Once on the beach, Barrett carried dispatches back and forth along the exposed beach while under heavy fire. He also carried wounded soldiers to an offshore evacuation boat. For his dauntless courage, Barrett was awarded the Medal of Honor.

The Allies landed over 160,000 troops on June 6, 1944, with an estimated 10,000 casualties, more than half of which were American. Today, a visit to the Normandy American Cemetery is the final resting place for 9,387 Americans and a sobering reminder of selfless service and the ultimate sacrifice made 80 years ago. 

The evening before D-Day.

EXCUSE ME. WE’RE GETTING HAYMITCH’S GAMES. FJEKDJRIDNFJEJR

imagine… you’re in an antique bookshop, full of soft golden light with rain pattering on the roof. it’s dim outside, and you don’t want to walk in the rain, but you’re not in a hurry, and you know it will end soon. maybe you buy a hot drink and cradle it in your palms while you browse. maybe you stand and watch the rain darken the pavement. maybe your heart doesn’t hurt, and everything feels okay

why does no one talk about this scene, its sooo adorable😭😭🥰🥰

".......And I had about a second to decide which way to fly, you know, because he looked like he was aiming for the right goal hoop — my right, obviously, his left —but I had a funny feeling that he was feinting, and so I took the chance and flew left — his right, I mean — and — well — you saw what happened,” he concluded modestly, sweeping his hair back quite unnecessarily so that it looked interestingly windswept and glancing around to see whether the people nearest to them — a bunch of gossiping third-year Hufflepuffs — had heard him. “And then, when Chambers came at me about five minutes later — what?” Ron said, stopping mid-sentence at the look on Harry’s face. “Why are you grinning?”

“I’m not,” said Harry quickly, looking down at his Transfiguration notes and attempting to straighten his face. The truth was that Ron had just reminded Harry forcibly of another Gryffindor Quidditch player who had once sat rumpling his hair under this very tree.

I'm reading ootp again after a long time and boy had i overlooked what an absolute disaster peeves was lmaoo

But not even the users of the Snackboxes could compete with that master of chaos, Peeves, who seemed to have taken Fred’s parting words deeply to heart. Cackling madly, he soared through the school, upending tables, bursting out of blackboards, and toppling statues and vases. Twice he shut Mrs. Norris inside suits of armor, from which she was rescued, yowling loudly, by the furious caretaker. He smashed lanterns and snuffed out candles, juggled burning torches over the heads of screaming students, caused neatly stacked piles of parchment to topple into fires or out of windows, flooded the second floor when he pulled off all the taps in the bathrooms, dropped a bag of tarantulas in the middle of the Great Hall during breakfast and, whenever he fancied a break, spent hours at a time floating along after Umbridge and blowing loud raspberries every time she spoke. None of the staff but Filch seemed to be stirring themselves to help her. Indeed, a week after Fred and George’s departure Harry witnessed Professor McGonagall walking right past Peeves, who was determinedly loosening a crystal chandelier, and could have sworn he heard her tell the poltergeist out of the corner of her mouth, “It unscrews the other way.”

But here's the thing, the entire task was to kill Dumbledore, something she should have known even Snape couldn't do, no matter how reliable he is. In fact, if Snape didn't succeed in completing the task, he would have been killed and voldemort his double agent (and we all know he'd definitely pin it on narcissa and punish the family severely for it). Now, ofc it didn't happen this way due to other circumstances (Dumbledore wearing the ring), but narcissa didn't know this. Neither did voldemort, no one apart from Snape and Dumbledore knew this. She made the choice she made with only the limited amount of info she had. Does anyone think tht the whole thing would hv worked as conveniently as it did if Dumbledore wasn't going to die anyways? As capable as he is, killing Dumbledore in his full power is not something even Snape would have been able to do (sure, Snape tells them that Dumbledore's duel with voldemort had weakened him, but in the cave we see how powerful Dumbledore actually is even after drinking tht potion, surely none of the DEs or voldemort wud hv underestimated him that much). In the end it was lucky for narcissa that things worked out the way they did, but like I mentioned in the post, it's hardly out of any brilliant scheme of hers and simply because the circumstances were convenient, much like how Remus lucked out in the 3rd book coz it turned out sirius wasn't a murderer after all. If Dumbledore wasn't going to die already at the end of that yr, imo he would have sacrificed Draco for the greater good (-hv a kid tortured and killed rather than losing the leader of the main resistance against voldemort), irrespective of the fact that Snape does mention that voldemort probably intended for him to do it in the end.

And imo trusting a double agent is stupid no matter how convincingly he plays his part. Even voldemort doesn't trust him completely, he used legilamancy on him even after he killed fucking Dumbledore (there's legit nothing more he cud hv done to prove his loyalty), i just think narcissa thinking tht she can (again, considering the amt of knowledge she had at the time) was incredibly stupid.

I feel like Narcissa Malfoy is rather overhyped(when she isn't being forgotten completely) as a character. She is the perfect example of 'the aristocratic wife' until the real world hits her in the face (and even then it takes a while).

Coz in the books she doesn't do shit. We have no indication that she has any sort of job(not that she'd need one). You could say she raised Draco but I don't count that because she did such a bad job at it; Draco turned out to be a spoilt, entitled bully (tho ofc Lucius equally shares the blame for this). She was pretty, came from money and a respectable family, and had no real valuable contribution of her own (unlike bellatrix who had the first 2 things too but was voldemort's right hand DE). Lucius has a constant presence in the books, we see different ways in which he subtly exercises his power and influence (ranging from donations to cozy up to fudge to threatening the other board governors that he'll curse their families if the don't remove dumbledore from the position of headmaster), plus his whole arc from one of voldemort's most trusted DEs (he was entrusted with a horcrux) to the pathetic situation we see him in in DH. Narcissa, however, has nothing of this sort. She's briefly introduced during the Qudditch world cup, not mentioned at all in book 5, and is an absolute dumbass in book 6.

Ik tht last one is controversial, but i was with bellatrix the whole time, coming to snape was fucking stupid. I get tht she thought he was on their side, especially considering he was with the DEs during the first war too, but y tf would u trust a double agent? Him convincingly answering all of bellatrix's questions means nothing, its obvious that he'll hv similarly tailored answers for dumbledore. I get that she was terrified and desperate, but it always struck me as odd that she never volunteered to take her 16 y/o son's place to get the task done (or at least we don't get any mention of this, and at any rate i don't think voldy wud hv oblidged considering this was punishment for lucius's failures), or if she already knew that this wasn't a viable option, she doesn't even try to help him out herself. Instead she runs straight to snape and weeps on his floor. This is so unlike, say, lily, who stood in btw her baby boy and voldemort. Mind u, the whole thing worked out only because dumbledore put on the ring and was going to die in a yr, she got lucky( imo this is lyk remus getting lucky with keeping sirius being an animagus as a secret coz he didn't turn out to be a mass murderer after all). U couldn't even say she was using snape too because she's clearly too distraught in tht scene to be doing any kind of manipulation. It all falls on the shoulder of her 16 y/o son to keep his family safe from voldemort.

She doesn't do anything throughout book 7 until the very end, where she lies to voldemort just to know if her son's alive or not, which inadvertently leads to voldemort being defeated by harry. This is only thing of substance she does in the entire series(and likewise i ll give her the credit, it was ballsy asf). As much as i appreciate her for what she did in the end, i think the fact that it took her roughly 40 years to do something of value is heavily ignored.

Man ihnc how others my age are doing all the stuff they're doing. I'm just tired. Have been since lyk middle school. I do absolutely nothing all day and i just discovered i always find new things to distract me, so it doesn't really matter if I come out of social media and stuff. Occasionally something vil get my attention and i actually do something but I always lose interest in it. I feel much better with my friends and appear completely normal lyk they are. I feel so disconnected from my ambitions and interests, they almost don't feel real. I know i need to be working my ass off coz I m going to uni next yr, i need to work for a seat in a good college, and i keep telling myself that I will start tomorrow, then the next, and it goes on and on but somehow i never do. Embarrassingly enough, I've been lyk this for years now but I m finally old enough to actually face consequences for it. I m just so drained and I hv no strength left to face whatever life vil throw at me. I still have no clue y, sure, shit's been happening around but not directly to me, and tbfh, ppl who've seen far worse are doing much better and everyone has something or the other, but no matter what I do I'm just not able to change, idk if I m just lazy or sheltered and making excuses for it or if there's actually something here (highly doubtful) but I just start crying whenever I even try to face the reality of the absolute mess tht is my life and I hv literally no idea what to do with it. I'm definitely going to tell myself tomorrow morning that I was being dramatic about all of this and I m much better, atp i don't even know if I m gaslighting myself or actually being real

The fact that by book 2 Harry thinks of Draco as his nemesis just delights me. Draco clearly decides if he can’t be Harry’s friend he’ll be his nemesis. You’d think this would flop epically because his competition is Lord fucking Voldemort but he succeeds because he really does live rent free in Harry’s head. Wild.

Loony Lovegood, they called her

“We were young, thoughtless – carried away with our own cleverness.”

          - Remus Lupin, Prisoner of Azkaban

you: always.

me, an intellectual: lily, take harry and go.

As interesting as the marauders era is in general, can u imagine what it would have been like for a normal kid going to school at the time? Imagine having to go to school with:

2 bullies who think no end of themselves, randomly hexing ppl who r just trying to live their lives

random others who are entertained by a someone's pants being exposed

kids who just casually use dark magic against ppl as a laugh

emo edgelord who's also a wannabe fascist throwing around racial slurs

'my daddy didn't love me so this guy who's advocating for genocide is my new father figure'

(oh and heads up, there's a war going on outside, they want to kill u if u don't hv magical parents, sucks to be u ig haha)

Lyk, as interesting as the characters are, I'd love to read a fic on the marauders era from the pov of some normal chill kid who's just there to learn magic lmao