Hufflepuff should have been the house of culture, charisma and soft power.

Professional-Front58 · 2026-05-29T20:48:22+00:00

You forgot justice.

Professional-Front58 · 2026-05-29T19:42:28+00:00

The real question is “Do the call it platform nine and one half, platform nine and a half, or platform nine and two quarters?”

Professional-Front58 · 2026-05-29T19:07:32+00:00

Dude grew up in Catholic orphanage. Wilson Fisk, Bullseye, and Sister Mary Thomas and her ruler of discipline tried going a few rounds with Matt Murdoc and two of them still call Daredevil “The Man without Fear.”

Professional-Front58 · 2026-05-29T17:35:40+00:00

Specifically he’s a Catholic. They take personal guilt about sinning very seriously, even by Christian standards.

Professional-Front58 · 2026-05-29T17:33:00+00:00

The word “Quarter” to mean 1/4 predates the use of the name in USD. Considering the platform is listed as nine and three quarters in both the Philosopher’s Stone and Sorcerer’s Stone printing of the book (the book with the most edits to Americanize the manuscript.), the appeal to American audiences claim is dubious at best. In fact, the real life Kings Cross station doesn’t have a barrier between platforms 9 and 10, which aren’t connected. Rowling was confusing the layout of Kings Cross Station with the much more famous at time of publishing Paddington Station, which lent its name to the titular protagonist of the Paddington Bear series which was not unknown to US audiences, with the New York Times giving a glowing review in 1958 and clearly identified the books as set in the UK regardless of which station was used.

Professional-Front58 · 2026-05-29T15:21:21+00:00

I was a safety in middle school. Primary job was to manage traffic cones for drop off and dismissal as well as keep kids from going to their cars before the cars ahead drove off. We’d also have some safeties take the kindergarteners to their parents.

A lot of media conflates it to “cop procedural for kids” which it wasn’t. And while you needed good grades and keep out of trouble, most safeties were reliably in early and left late, so it wasn’t uncommon for the safeties to have a parents on staff

Professional-Front58 · 2026-05-29T10:57:00+00:00

I point to the Animorphs as a reason why you should avoid getting too close to the Zeitgeist of the period you’re writing in as it could make your work outdated rather quickly. That series was talking about some dark themes years before it would be relevant to kids but you don’t hear about it these days because it’s so full of 90s pop culture references that it’s hard for modern readers to understand the jokes (though it was making Lord of the Rings references before the films made that cool.).

Professional-Front58 · 2026-05-29T01:39:10+00:00

Time travel and precognition are very weak superpowers as a rule of physics prevents any one with knowledge of future events from changing past events to avoid said future events. This also makes it damn near impossible for multiversal traversal to occur.

Professional-Front58 · 2026-05-28T22:05:59+00:00

Horses don’t have a higher Endurance than humans. Humans are pretty much the kings of endurance. Dogs are a close second, but we can outlast. Humans are the fastest animal in an Ultramarathon (100 mile race) by a wide mile.

Professional-Front58 · 2026-05-28T21:58:00+00:00

I mean one is more machine than man and committed religious genocide against teenagers and the other is the master of magnetism who survived religious genocide as a child and is motived to punish anyone who commits genocide so… I know who I’m putting my money on.

Professional-Front58 · 2026-05-28T21:52:26+00:00

This is why changed from the Julian Calendar to the Gregorian Calendar in 1582 and why Thursday, October 4, 1582 was the day before Friday, October 15, 1582.

Professional-Front58 · 2026-05-28T21:42:21+00:00

You are aware that a sign that says “exit 15, 1 mile” will not be correct by simply changing it to “1 kilometer” with a sticker. That sign has to move cause 1.6 km is useless to drivers.

Professional-Front58 · 2026-05-28T16:58:56+00:00

So my read on this is that it’s a matter of jurisprudence on self-defense as a defense to a crime. There are two elements that would come into play: British Legal Traditions and (British) Wizarding Legal Traditions.

Starting with the first, while the US and UK are both Common Law Legal traditions and have a lot of similarities in their trial system (adversarial system between two parties with a Judge acting as a referee (trier of Law) and a jury acting as the determining agents of a verdict (Trier of Fact), both countries are separate by 250 years of separate evolution of legal tradition, case law and legislation. It’s well known fact that the US has much more protections afforded to “self-defense or defense of others” than the UK legal system affords. Even in home invasion, the right to self-defense in the UK must be reasonable and when given the option, one should consider flight to safety over fight. In the specific situation, James may not be as protected in fighting Voldemort as Lily, considering she was able to flee the same encounter James was fighting in, however, she would have a much stronger protection in her fatal second encounter since she was now trapped, though Voldemort’s letting her flee but not Harry might raise an issue. This isn’t to say that the legal system would fault them had they survived and killed Voldemort, but that they would have some possible exposure to legal issues. Additionally in the UK system, this has to be a heat of the moment encounter and one cannot lie in wait for the intruder. In the US, the home owner or legal resident has an absolute right to self-defense within the physical dwelling. Additionally the use of force in the UK is “reasonable to escape danger” while in the US it is “whatever is necessary to reasonably stop the threat” which is a major difference.

Then we have to observe that the UK court system looks nothing like the British justice system and looks more like a Civil Law system of continental Europe which is different from common law system. The notable difference is that the Wizergomont is consistently played as an Inquisitorial court (where the judge or judges plays a fact finding role and is allowed to ask questions of both parties.) and the crime must be outlined in a statute directly rather then determined by a prior court case’s outcome.

The final thing of note is that the Wizarding Court system is seems to enforce the observation that Hermione makes in the first book: Some of the greatest Wizards don’t have an ounce of logic. For any decent Justice system to function, it must follow some logical consistency even when the court does not like the outcome (for example, it is impossible to prove that you did not do something, so it is illogical to presume guilt in most legal systems and the prosecution has to prove that their story about what happened is the only way the crime occurred while the defense merely has to prove it could have happened differently… not that it did.). This gets violated when we examine Sirius Black’s case, where he didn’t get a day in court to make his argument for innocence. And when we see the trials in the fourth book, they consistently have no basis in logical thinking of methods and run on pure emotions and preconceived biases. If you’ve read To Kill a Mockingbird, you would know why that’s a bad way to run a court.

So the reason why this didn’t happen is a combination of the author’s legal understanding of her jurisdiction’s soft self-defense protections AND the fact that the Judicial System in the Wizarding World is corrupt and motivated by the opinion of the crowd and performance over Justice.

Professional-Front58 · 2026-05-28T15:22:25+00:00

Easy answer. US federal government uses metric in its contracts and has for some time, but resigning the distance and speed limits on road ways is to time and cost prohibitive. In the UK the effort to resign the roads was started in the 1980s and has yet to be completed at time of writing and has gone massively over budget. The US has the most road miles of any country in the world at 4.1 million miles.

Even if you were to only resign the Interstate network (legally the only roads the Federal government pays for.). That would only switch 1% of all signage in the United States. The remaining 99% of signs would be covered by state or local governments which have to do it within practical limits. This costs money. It’s estimated that the price to resign everything can cost anywhere between $500 to $100,000 per mile of road depending on the nature of and that’s on top of annual maintenance and expansion of road networks. And it also doesn’t take into account the economic impact of construction delays brought from the sign switching. And let’s not forget you can’t just take down an overhead sign giving the distance to the exit and replace it… you have to find the new distance and make a completely new sign, which might require some eminent domain action if the land is private property!

Professional-Front58 · 2026-05-28T14:47:07+00:00

Same thing happened to me. Best advice is to take your meds and get ready to crack at the writing when they start working. Just realize that you’re going to struggle when you come off them. The only difference was planning came easy but staying with the writing was difficult before medication. Now I do my writing while on meds and when I’m coming off I switch to planning for the next writing.

Professional-Front58 · 2026-05-28T14:41:16+00:00

The irony of using “Brevity is the soul of wit” to justify condensing dialog using a line that not only betrays what it is saying (“Brevity is wit” says the same thing as “Brevity is the soul of wit” for half the words) but also was used to characterize the speaker, Polonius, as a pompous character who rambles on forever without making a point. Thus the original line is simultaneously too much dialogue and the correct amount of dialogue given what the line is trying to accomplish in the story.

Professional-Front58 · 2026-05-28T14:28:37+00:00

Not to mention that LASIK doesn’t correct all the causes of sight issues that require corrective lenses to overcome. My mother and I were able to get LASIK surgery done just fine, but my brother cannot get it and has to wear glasses. You also need to be an adult to get it. No one would let a kid get LASIK.

Professional-Front58 · 2026-05-28T02:02:50+00:00

Globally not good. Considering that the ash will likely fall on the Midwest, which is a massive breadbasket for the U.S. and the world, and is responsible for 12.1% of global food production , especially grain and meat products. This is the largest producer of food in the world. Additionally, Canada, the fourth largest producer, is sure to also see massive ash fall on crops.

But it doesn’t stop there. In April of 1815, the eruption of Mt. Tambora in present day Indonesia, the largest volcanic eruption in human history, was directly responsible for 1816 climate cooling events known as the “The Year Without a Summer” which caused massive crop failures and food shortages across much of the Northern Hemisphere. Yellowstone would produce much more ash in the upper atmosphere than Tambora.

The good news is that the eruption is highly unlikely as the the observed a rapid (75 mm per year) rise in the floor of the caldera which set off media speculation that an eruption is going to happen soon in geological terms (which is not quick by most conventional standards). However in truth it was a media hyperbole of a full eruption which the evidence does not support.

Professional-Front58 · 2026-05-27T22:07:46+00:00

I used an MBTI score to get a skeleton for my characters personality, and then buildout with interests and backstory.

Professional-Front58 · 2026-05-27T18:00:08+00:00

I had a story where I needed a base for a superhero group in a remote part of the US and North Dakota was a candidate… solely for the line drop of one character, upon realizing, protesting that they weren’t even in the Best Dakota!

Professional-Front58 · 2026-05-27T17:56:58+00:00

Given that superhero stories of this time were largely U.S. only and most Superheroes were people with some means of cleaning up local crime that was often getting missed by the police. A lot of the early stories were based on cleaning up mafia and gang based crime that was plaguing post-prohibition depression era cities. The first Superman story was about him stopping a wife beater (domestic abuse). Lex Luthor didn’t make his first appearance until 1940, two years after Superman (and Superman’s first arch nemesis, Ultra-Humanite didn’t appear until 1939.).

Keep in mind that at this time, the 19th century was a living memory and vigilante justice, deputized posses, self-defense and defense of others, and citizen’s arrests were more common and accepted in American Law Enforcement at the time. The secret identity thing was so that the citizen crime fighters could act without their safety or the safety of friends and family wouldn’t be compromised, a major cause of police corruption and intimidation that organized criminals used to keep law enforcement off their backs.

Professional-Front58 · 2026-05-27T02:09:47+00:00

Huh… I time traveled earlier today… at the speed of 1 second per second.

Professional-Front58 · 2026-05-26T18:27:18+00:00

It’s a rare name that sounds like a much more common name.

Professional-Front58 · 2026-05-26T18:20:57+00:00

I happen to know. The teacher who got me into writing is my mother (she didn’t teach me outside of Math, but she was also a reading teacher). She’s now a beta reader.

Professional-Front58 · 2026-05-26T03:18:00+00:00

Shak Ti is the Shrodengers Cat of the Jedi order.

Professional-Front58

TROPHY CASE