Whoever made you think you'd get teased for not drinking alcohol at parties was lying. You're their new supreme. You can go pick up more snacks. You can take care of the fallen. You can talk to the cops. If you have a car, you can drive people home.

In movies they always portray the sober person as a nerd but it's more like being a priest. Your lack of engagement in the carnal realities of the party makes you holy and powerful. You are a vital pillar of the community. A rock in a raging storm. Now go answer the door for the pizza man.

Whistleblower on Reddit rage-blogs about how the food delivery company he worked for as a developer is ripping customers AND drivers off.

Main post screenshotted here in case it gets yanked; the whole thread is worth a read.

Posted January 2026.

I’ve been thinking a bit about Harry Potter again and specifically why it feels so different to me from other bad things I’ve enjoyed.

I’m trained in literary criticism, I personally study a lot of stuff from people with stupid opinions in my freetime, including opinions about people like me, I enjoy reading in general. What is it about Harry Potter that makes me just not want to come back to it?

I think it’s kind of how it became a part of culture for a while. And at the time it wasn’t criticized as heavily as other things I witnessed, at least from my child’s perspective. Poking holes in media has been a favorite pastime of mine for long time, including with Harry Potter, but the fundamental emotional core of the thing never quite felt flawed.

Yes Rowling put some stupid things in there but that’s to be expected from a white woman in Britain who has had most of her life being taken care of for her. At the end of the day, the intentions always felt solid even if the execution was less than perfect.

Then came the slow eroding of her reputation. I picked up on it before most people did. The moment she went “mask off” in 2020 I and many others were surprised that people saw it that way. She’d been consorting with transphobes for years at that point. In online trans spaces she’d been a known radfem apologist for a long time.

But then she got worse. Like she started materially hurting people with her money. And that’s about when to me I really started to get sick when thinking about Harry Potter.

It’s like. She’s not just a privately bigoted person who accidentally made a story about misfits finding a place that they belonged. She’s taking the power that the marketing machine behind that series granted her to cause active harm right now.

It’s at about that point I no longer found myself with the ability to turn on my critical brain trained in the ways of lit analysis or my casual consumer brain just liking fun things even if they’re bad. I just felt a pit in my stomach. I moved the family copies of the Harry Potter books from my room into the communal family bookshelf and then into my dad’s room because I couldn’t stand looking at them anymore.

It’s not just that Rowling is an author with bad opinions. I’ve read plenty of those. It’s not just that the series isn’t what I thought it was. That’s par for the course of most things you read as a child and revisit as an adult. It’s the combined power of her and her brand being everywhere and inescapable and her currently using the power that gives her for evil. Not only was the core of the series disingenuous but the series itself is currently actively causing people harm and normies just casually walk by it at Barnes and noble vaguely wondering if they should buy a mug for their cousin not knowing or not caring what that actually represents.

I can read dumb shit. I can handle my beloved childhood media being worse than I remember it. I can even handle my favorite authors turning out to be absolute garbage but the level of how all this happened with Harry Potter almost has no equivalent that I can think of because it is so big and so destructive and so intertwined with its author in the way that very few other things are.

The author cannot be dead with Harry Potter because she keeps coming back in to twist the knife. She has implanted herself into the series itself so firmly that trying to remove her from it make the entire thing implode on itself into something else entirely. And she uses that firm rooting that she’s established to materially harm people. People like me just one continent over. I’m sure she’d also interfere in other countries politics if she legally could.

It’s like. You can’t think critically through the full scope and ramifications of something when she hasn’t even stopped twisting that knife of hers. I can playfully stick my tongue out at shakespeares bad opinions because he isn’t alive right now spending his money on bad things. And even most authors alive now don’t have financial knives big enough to make much of a difference.

Rowling though? She can just throw a million dollars at something. It’s no wonder I can’t look at those books. My siblings are being threatened with them. It’s a lot easier to study a knife in a museum than one that’s currently being held to someone’s throat.

I don’t think I can be trusted to ever study this particular knife objectively ever again. Because I’ve seen what it can do. I’ve seen where it’s pointed. I can’t really have rational academic thoughts while I’m watching that.

I actually believe the statistics offered by the White House + the Metro Police Department suggesting that crime rates are down in DC since the start of the federal occupation (on top of the massive declines in crime which had already occurred last year for reversion-to-the-mean reasons). I am currently sitting in one of the busiest nightlife intersections in DC: 14th + U St NW. This is the exact spot where a key battle took place— I am sitting across the street from where a Subway sandwich was thrown at an FBI officer (pic related).

It is now past 9:45 pm. Gradually, over the next 75 minutes, this is an intersection that would usually be flooded by people from every corner of this nation’s demographic map. This is a place where Vietnam veterans get drunk in the same bars as leather gays, where juniors from Howard University smoke weed next to their professors. I would estimate that, between the hours of 10:00 pm and 4:00 am, tens of thousands of people visit the bars and clubs within 0.5 miles of this intersection, every weekend night.

Tonight, it is at maybe 40% of the capacity that it would normally be around this time. Nobody is here. I have primetime tickets to one of the busiest nightlife intersections in North America, and it is nearly empty.

I believe that crime has sharply declined in DC in the short-term, because no one is going outside. In-person restaurant reservations have collapsed into free fall. People are terrified of the fact that federal agents are randomly kidnapping people off of the street, setting up papers-please checkpoints, doing whatever they want with impunity. So they are just staying out of the District. Most people who live here are spending more time inside, and people in Maryland and Virginia are staying out entirely. I imagine that there will be another wave of physical retail closures similar to the one during the initial COVID commercial real estate shock.

Early data from Brookings provides some evidence for the idea that the military occupation of DC weakened the city's economy (in comparison to the other parts of the DC-Maryland-Virginia metro area, the "DMV").

When the National Guard was deployed to DC in August, the rate of YOY change in consumption by DMV residents fell dramatically faster in DC than it did in the surrounding areas. In other words, the rate of consumer spending dropped much faster in the place where the Guard was deployed compared to similar areas where it was not.

With that said, it also wouldn't surprise me if these effects were temporary. People seem to be adjusting to the presence of National Guard and other feds on DC streets; it still isn't seen as "normal," but it's far less shocking now than it was at first. Plus, while I don't have evidence to prove this, I get the sense that some of the resources originally deployed to DC have been shifted to operations in other cities.

new least favourite animal discovered. WHAT THR FUCK.

it appears i am causing a scene in the hartebeest community. im sorry but your guy looks like he was in a cartoon and he got 2 cymbals crashed against the side of his head its sad but its true.

So recently I discovered that there is a historical recreation group that runs a local park. That park is a old abandoned quarry that a local man bought and then started rebuilding historic buildings in. Like, an old doctor's office. An old farmhouse. A period blacksmith's shop. That sort of thing. He did this for 50 years, puttering around on the property happily and indulging his special interest in re creating period accurate nails and horseshoes. We stan a local flourishing autistic king.

ANYWAY. He donated it to the local city when he died and now a local historical reenactment society runs it. IDK why I didn't know about this because I got married there. The only recent revelation is that the reenactment society will accept, say, any local madwoman who messages them out of the blue going 'hey u need someone who can spin on a period wheel?'

Long story short, yes. The previous lady who could hand spin was 87 and died recently. Peacefully, of being 87, and they've been going mad trying to find someone else who knows how the fuck to refurbish and work a spinning wheel. I'm eyeballing Frigga rn hardcore for that 'hey I should google that place' thought.

HOWEVER. I encountered a reality check.

Namely, Liz, the lady who runs the group, texted me 'omg do you know how to work a loom?'

Me, who has been marinating in a bubble of fiber artists online for years; I mean not like super well? I've dabbled but I've not attempted anything more adventurous than a regular plain weave, fair warning.

Liz; what's a plain weave

Me; .....

Me; Okay so like what kind of loom is it.

Liz; it's a big one (sends a picture of an antique floor loom)

Me; oh shit six pedals, nice, well, the heddles look in good shape so...

Liz; what's a heddle

Me;

Me; Yes I can clean it, set it up properly, and warp it. What do you want to weave.

Liz, after sending about 48 delighted emojis; rag rugs to sell in the gift shop omg omg thank you so much it's so complicated looking all of us have been afraid to touch it

Me; this is that xckd relative familiarity comic isn't it

you're laughing. charles dickens had a son named plorn and you're laughing

HE HAD A SON NAMED

WHAT

NICK I LOOKED IT UP AND SAW NOTHING OF THE SORT IS THIS A PRANK

technically his name was edward but everyone called him plorn

Edward “Plorn” Dickens. my god.

I have something worse

oh???

imagine getting stuck with the nickname Plorn

imagine getting sent to live in the Australian outback when you were sixteen

WHY WERE THEY SO CRUEL TO MY BOY PLORN

I have an answer to that one too

The face of a man whose father nicknamed him Plorn.

Born without a groove 😔

With each addition to this, I find myself nodding and murmuring, "Mm hm. The Plorn Dickens."

‌

‘Twould be better he was never Plorn.

Crushing news: shrinkflation so bad the funny number has decreased from 69 to 67

the cool s, the crudely drawn penis, and the among us crewmate are in a beautiful poly relationship on the inner door of the bathroom stall