Spyke

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Anon describes experience

One day I'm going to frame a coloured drawing I still have from year one. The following event is also still ingrained in my mind: We had to colour in a picture with several animals, one of which was a small spotted reptile in a puddle of water. Clearly a salamander.

The teacher crossed it out in red pen and screamed that I am old enough to know lizards are green and there is no such thing as a black and yellow animal on this earth.

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Rowling Rule

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I haven't read harry potter for 20 years, got totally burned out before finishing the series and as you can imagine 14 year old me wasn't exactly very aware of trans issues but here's a few even my thick headed teenage brain found weird:

  • Bankers are basically jewish caricatures - short goblins with long noses that only care about money

  • Weird slavery message where Hermione is proven wrong for wanting to free the elves as a lot of them are happy with servitude

  • Every foreign character is a weird stereotype. I think there was even a Korean character with a chinese name like Chong? There was clearly no concern for portraying anything correctly, just a weak attempt to increase diversity with no effort I guess

There were also a few weird things adjacent to harry potter like how every major character is basically described as alabaster white and she later attempted to hide her bias by saying "I never explicitly said that X was white". Lady, you literally wrote that Hermione was a pale redhead in dozens if not hundreds of pages. I don't care if she's played by a 4 inch tall blue alien, just own up to it and stop gaslighting people.

Also, not a big deal but it always felt weird to me that even the nominally poor family lived a life of luxury. I could tell the person writing never truly knew hardship from the way she wrote the Weasleys. I can't say I have much experience myself but it felt strange how they kept saying a clearly upper middle class family was destitute and made fun of.

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Microsoft Can't Stop Being Annoying About OneDrive | They make you take a survey every time you close OneDrive on your device.

I feel bad for saying this but I pay for onedrive because it was the best way to make a synchronised library of ebooks that I can use offline in my tablet.

Yes every other cloud storage solution was more expensive or outright didn't support it for some god forsaken reason. Some needed you to manually press a download button. Google Drive needs you to manually set every file to available offline and even then it won't work all the time.

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The Extra Mile

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Eh going the extra mile is how I got so burned out I had to quit a job for the sake of my physical and mental health.

Did I get promoted? Hell no. Never did. The boss's wife sure did though.

Yes I'm aware you said balance but I just had to share why I'm currently trying not to care anymore. Note I said trying, I'm really terrible at not giving everything to every project I'm in.

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Ant smell

My weird "paranormal" quirk is knowing when someone is sick by smell. My nose is usually blocked up and I can barely smell flowers but for some reason I can just tell when someone is incubating some sickness that will make them bedridden the next day.

No idea how it works. I just smell "sick" - it's kind of this warm earthy ground smell. I can even smell it on myself sometimes and I'll know I need to take a day off tomorrow. My theory is I can smell something off in the skin temperature.

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logical

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1/4 of a meter is not not a common measurement but 25 cm is. I think it's just a matter of whichever system you're used to, like discussing which language is better.

That being said, meters are just more precise, hence why american measurements are all defined by metric and then turned into feet, thumbs and dicklengths.

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Germany decides to leave history in the past and prepare for war

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Yes. There are actual letters and memos from german leadership about poking the Austrians into making the situation in Serbia worse in hopes a tiping point would give them an excuse to take swathes of Russia and France in the coming conflict.

Bonus points: methods for the handling of jews and other undesirables in the occupied lands were already being talked about