
if i look back, i am lost
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Xuebing Du
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year

Love Begins
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Mike Driver
Not today Justin
dirt enthusiast

#extradirty
will byers stan first human second
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
art blog(derogatory)
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styofa doing anything
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me

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@elizabethsgenes
I wonder what would happen if Dudley grew up in the wizarding world but still as a muggle? like kind of reverse AU where his parents are dead and he has to go to Lily for whatever reason? do you think he would become bitter like Petunia about magic?
Lily remembered her sister, how there had been a time she was curious and delighted about magic, before it slowly sank in that she could look and not touch.
The last thing Petunia had said to Lily before she died was a chilly goodbye, ending a holiday dinner where they’d had a shrieking row in the entryway. Petunia had said freak and Lily had hissed better than this, better than this being my whole fucking world, Tune, do you even see yourself, are you happy–
And now here was Dudley Vernon Dursley fussing himself to sleep as Lily walked the halls of the Godric’s Hollow house. His tiny soft hands with their tiny soft fingernails curled under her chin, the same way Harry always had.
She passed James, who was gently bouncing his way up the hall the opposite way. “I think he’s asleep,” James mouthed over Harry’s tousled head. His hair was the same mess, bent down to peer at his sleeping son.
Lily stopped where she stood, her nephew heavy on her chest, her husband smiling, her sister buried. “James,” she said. “How are we going to do this?”
“Oh,” he said. “Hey. Don’t you cry, you’ll start them off– unless you need to cry, I mean, you go ahead, hey, sweetheart, hey, it’s alright, you just let it out.” He stepped forward, shifting Harry gently to his other shoulder, and pressed his forehead to hers. “We tuck them in, okay, that’s what we do next. Then we go to our own bed, okay, and go to sleep, and when we wake up it’ll be a new day.”
“A new day,” she said. “Another day– James, that’s the– I’m so tired.”
“So let’s sleep. It’ll look better in the morning,” he said. “And if it doesn’t look better this morning, it’ll look better in the next one.”
“You promise?”
“Better than that. I’ll show you. Every day,” he said and kissed her cold forehead.
–
Dudley had not shown up on the Potters’ doorstep with the milk bottles. Lily had gotten a phone call from the landline she still had installed in Godric’s Hollow, about an accident, and she had gone down to the Muggle police station to identify the bodies.
The cupboard under the stairs was filled with spiders, broomsticks, and the sewing machine Lily’s mother had given her when she married James– that’s all. Dudley slept downstairs. Uncle Remus taught Dudley and Harry to knock out coded messages through the wall their rooms shared.
In the backyard, beside a rickety porch and an ambitious hedge, James taught them to fly– first on little tot brooms where their toes brushed the grass the whole time, then out of the barrels of practice brooms James used for lessons and coaching Little League Quidditch.
When the boys turned ten, five weeks apart, they both got shiny new Nimbuses on Dudley’s birthday (which came first), and a set of enchanted Quidditch balls on Harry’s, to share. The Bludgers were enchanted to be very kind but Dudley spent long afternoons whacking them far afield while Harry chased the Snitch at his back.
Harry had a scar on his forehead, like a jagged bit of lightning. Dudley had no scars– the car crash that had killed his parents hadn’t touched him where he sat strapped into a car seat in the back, chewing on a stuffed dinosaur toy.
Lily did not believe in lying to the children. She was bare years off being a child herself, and spare moments on the far side of a war. When Dudley asked about his parents, she told him there had been an accident. She pulled pictures off the shelf and wrote Petunia’s old university friends for more.
Photographs came by mailman, the images still and unnatural to Dudley’s eye. Every day he’d gone out to play, for years, he’d been waving at the picture near the back door of his aunt and uncle on their wedding day, and they waved back every time.
“She was very clever,” Lily said. “Your mom liked to know everything.”
“And my dad?”
“Vernon liked… cars?” James offered. “That’s the word, right, Lily?”
“I didn’t know him very well,” Lily said. “He liked drills, I think; he worked for a firm that made them, and he talked about that a lot.”
Dudley brushed his thumbs over the dull edges of the photos. When Lily went off to Auror headquarters the next morning for work, James bundled the boys up and took them on an impromptu invisible tour of Grunnings Drill Manufacturing Inc.
They tiptoed down halls and past water coolers and ringing fellytones. They held hands under the Cloak as they dodged around the machines on the manufacturing floor, thumping and pounding and whirring away loudly enough that Harry and Dudley could whisper to each other under the noise. An elevator took them all the way up to the top floor. Harry whistled cheerily and eerily along with the elevator music while the Muggles slowly edged toward the doors and pressed floor buttons lower than they’d originally wanted.
There were boxes and cabinets and folders and desks and staticky monitor screens full of numbers strewn in endless grids. “Merlin’s knuckles,” said Harry, who was seven and a half and rather proud of this expletive. “People can look at this all day, their whole lives, and not die?”
“Work is hard work,” said James.
“At least mum gets to curse things.”
“But my dad liked it?” Dudley said, peering at a white board that was bleeding enthusiastic marker. “There’s a lot of things, here. Maybe he liked knowing things, too.”
When the boys asked about the scar on Harry’s forehead, Lily and James looked at each other. “You know how sometimes we sit with Uncle Remus and talk about a war?” James said. “Or with Ms. Amelia or Mr. Mundungus.”
“Mr. Mundungus is kinda smelly,” Harry said helpfully.
“It’s not nice to say so though,” said James, and Lily made a face.
“Are we raising them to be nice?” Lily said.
“I’m trying,” said James.
“You talk about a war,” said Harry and shrugged. Dudley nodded.
“There was a very bad man, in those days,” said James.
“Voldemort,” said Lily, and James made a face.
“He was so scary a lot of people don’t like to say his name, even now,” said James. “And he was coming after us because we had been fighting against him, in the war. He came to the house and he tried to hurt you, Harry. But it didn’t work. It hurt him instead, and gave you that scar.”
“Is he going to come back?” said Dudley, who was paler than his normal pink.
“No one’s heard of him since then,” said Lily.
“Where were you?” said Harry, because all his life they had been right there.
“Oh,” said Lily, but her throat closed up.
“We were at Dudley’s mum and dad’s funeral,” said James. “Our friend– our friend Sirius was watching you two. The bad man, he came to the house. He. Well. I.”
“Sirius died,” said Lily, one hand squeezing James’s knee and the other reaching down to brush hair off Dudley’s forehead. “You lived, Harry, and Voldemort vanished. And that’s why sometimes people stare in the streets, baby.” James tweaked Harry’s collar absently.
–
Two days after they had buried Lily’s sister, the Potters had stood together in the first chills of November and buried James’s brother.
Sirius had been burned off the Black family tree years before. Lily and James had talked to his cousin Andromeda, to Remus, and then they had laid him to rest in the Potter family plot. At the wake, they’d told old jokes about squirrel breath, shedding, and man’s best friend. Remus had fallen asleep on their couch and stayed for a month.
–
It took a two hour row with HR for Lily to get two passes to the Ministry’s Bring Your Kid To Work Day.
“He’s a Muggle.”
“He’s not,” Lily snapped. “He’s family.”
She had to get permission, sign a million forms, and she also had to take the boys in early so that Dudley could get smothered in the spells that would keep the Anti-Muggle wards around the Ministry from activating on him. “If a Muggle stumbles in somehow, they just see a funny-smelling supply cabinet and turn back around,” Lily told Dudley. He nodded and dragged Harry off by the wrist to go look at the fountain.
The windows were pouring sunlight into the underground room– the maintenance workers had just gotten a win on their contract negotiations and had banished the grimy rain-spattered windows of the previous weeks. The light hit the falling water, the golden statues, and the small excitable crowd of Ministry dependents who were gathering in the atrium. Dudley was fishing about in the fountain for Knuts to toss back out again, elbow-deep, and Harry was laughing and coming up with weird wishes to make on them.
Lily hadn’t said son. She’d said family, and that was true enough, wasn’t it? She didn’t say son– she had a son, and she had a nephew, a ward, another child who came to her after nightmares and scraped knees. It was not less, it was just words.
Lily worried about stealing more things from Petunia. Tuney had shrieked at her, in ladies’ restrooms and suburban foyers, had hissed at her in grocery store aisles and family dinners, because Lily got everything. And now Lily had her son.
Lily could just imagine it– could just see Petunia’s face twisting and chin stabbing at the air. You could have anything, and you took my son– my son!
“You left him to me,” Lily whispered, but that wasn’t quite right. “You left,” she whispered, and that wasn’t quite right either, so she strode off toward the fountain to ask the boys if they wanted to go see the Auror spellwork ranges. Dudley’s sodden shirt sleeves dripped all over the Ministry floors. Harry’s hair fell down into his eyes and they both grinned bright enough to rival the spelled sunlight.
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Afficher davantage
I feel like I need to share this because idk if Europeans are familiar with the presence of Aldi in the US, but at least especially in my area they’ve been growing a lot recently. Like Aldi bought out some local failing grocery chains where I live (Louisiana) and have opened Aldis in all these somewhat rural communities and small towns, which for the record I’m fine with
But as a result of this they are advertising a lot more in my area and also in many cases, the people in these areas have never been confronted with Aldi or any European grocery store. So the ads that Aldi is pushing out to its new US customer base feature a cowboy shopping at Aldi who is explaining to new Aldi customers how Aldi works. Like this cowboy is explaining you gotta put a quarter in the shopping cart and why there are very little name brands. A cowboy is how they want to reach their American customer base. They gave us a cowboy
Here he is, the Aldi Cowboy
After 13 years of this, it's still funny to me that detailing a full mental breakdown on tumblr is standard fare, but posting a nice selfie is a fraught decision.
this is the correct way around and every other social media site is wrong
The bones of some 5,000 souls cling to the walls and pillars of Évora’s Bone Chapel, raised in the late 16th century by Franciscan hands. Beneath its dim arches, hollow eyes seem to watch as the inscription above the door whispers its grim welcome: “We bones that are here, await yours.”- Évora, Portugal.
lesser known gifts of the spirit:
remembering all the mysteries in the right order
knowing how to use the ribbons in the prayer book
untangling rosaries from headphones/eachother
being able to pronounce Częstochowa correctly
Chicago From Above
Romania born, Razvan Sera is a talented 22-year-old aerial photographer who currently lives and works in the Chicago suburbs. Razvan has always had a fascination for sharing his unique perspective, and aerial photography offers him the perfect medium to do so. Sera uses DJI Phantom 4 Drone.
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I miss this city so much
Think it’s time to make a trip home ❤
@copperbadge
Some of these I think “Oh hey, I recognize that!” and some of them I’m all “The hell was that taken” but my favorite is the last one because you can see my dentist’s office in it. :D
At a 1915 auction, a millionaire named Cecil Chubb bought Stonehenge as a gift for his wife, but she hated it because she had sent him to buy a set of dining chairs. 3 years later, he decided it belonged to the English, so he gave it to his country on the conditions that the entrance fee would never cost more than a shilling and the locals could always have free access. Source
“What the fuck, Cecil. Our dining table is only 30 inches high. How the hell are we supposed to sit on these. Cecil, did you save the receipt?”
“My dear, they are an extraordinary megalit-”
“BUT ARE THEY CHAIRS, CECIL. ARE THEY CHAIRS?”
Listen, I’m with her
“Mary, I bought you a priceless historical relic that is also a famous tourist attraction. This is the best gift ever.”
“You’re an asshole, Cecil.”
“You had one job, Cecil,”
Me (A time traveler visiting 20-year old Mozart): OK, so, this is called an electric guitar, basically instead of the body functioning as a resonance chamber, it produces music by harnessing the power of lightning. Do you have any other questions?
Mozart (Currently shredding Violin Concerto No. 1 on the guitar, having figured it out within 30 seconds): What other music can be made from harnessed lightning?
Me (Loading up some heavy dubstep): Oh, we're just getting started.
I walked on water and tripped over an angel.
honestly "oracle that nobody believes" is such a solid trope. imagine trying to convince anybody in 2006 what the next two decades was gonna look like
This is an awesome use of what is probably a master's degree if not a doctorate and I am 100% thrilled that she shared it even though it was embarrassing and she squeaked.
Thank you, adorable scientist, for making people's lives better.
As an Australian, THIS WOMAN IS A FUCKING GODSEND.
this is Hannah Fry, Professor of the Public Understanding of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge and president of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications.
Crumch