0_0

Occasional HP metas and 0% support for JKR. Find me on AO3.

[mudwerks]

AI industry horrified to face largest copyright class action ever certified

Copyright class actions could financially ruin AI industry, trade groups say.

AI industry groups are urging an appeals court to block what they say is the largest copyright class action ever certified. They’ve warned that a single lawsuit raised by three authors over Anthropic’s AI training now threatens to “financially ruin” the entire AI industry if up to 7 million claimants end up joining the litigation and forcing a settlement.

well…darn

[flippyspoon]

like to charge reblog to cast financial ruin of the AI industry 🔮

[novella-november]

originally posted August 8th, 2025.

Authors have until March 30th, 2026 (That is just 9 days as of this reblog, which I am posting on March 21st, 2026) to file their claim against Anthropic to be reimbursed up to $3,000 per work found in the list.

What Authors Need to Know About the $1.5 Billion Anthropic Settlement

Updated February 18, 2026 IMPORTANT: The Claims Deadline Is March 30 Background  Bartz v. Anthropic is one of the major copyright lawsuits b

Please click the above link for all of the exact details of how to file a claim and to check for your works, and share this post as far and wide as you can before March 30th, 2026!

[shi1498912]

!!!SIGNAL BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOST!!!

[wilwheaton]

[josiecarioca]

[trankinstein]

Less magic schools. More magic universities. Unlearn the simplified models of your secondary education. Discover how to reference scrolls written by a wizard possessed by a different wizard. Identify bias in the voices that whisper from beyond the veil. Have your institution be accused of promoting a Merlinist agenda. Become addicted to energy potions.

[sourdough-seal]

“omg you’re so creative. how do you get your ideas” i hallucinate a single scene in the taco bell drive thru and then spend 13 months trying to write it

[said-snape-softly]

I found a fascinating difference between editions of HBP that changes Dumbledore’s final entreaty to Draco on top of the Astronomy Tower.

The first comes from my physical edition of HBP (First American Edition, July 2005), and the second from what I believe is a later UK version (via Potter Search):

“No, you can’t,” said Malfoy, his wand hand shaking very badly indeed. “Nobody can. He told me to do it or he’ll kill me. I’ve got no choice.”

“He cannot kill you if you are already dead. Come over to the right side, Draco, and we can hide you more completely than you can possibly imagine. What is more, I can send members of the Order to your mother tonight to hide her likewise. Nobody would be surprised that you had died in your attempt to kill me—forgive me, but Lord Voldemort probably expects it. Nor would the Death Eaters be surprised that we had captured and killed your mother—it is what they would do themselves, after all. Your father is safe at the moment in Azkaban… When the time comes, we can protect him too. Come over to the right side, Draco… you are not a killer…”

Vs:

“Come over to the right side, Draco, and we can hide you more completely than you can possibly imagine. What is more, I can send members of the Order to your mother tonight to hide her likewise. Your father is safe at the moment in Azkaban. ... When the time comes, we can protect him too. Come over to the right side, Draco ... you are not a killer. ...”

This is not a difference of a word or two; there must have been a reason for such a substantial edit to be made post-publication. I’d absolutely love to hear everyone’s thoughts on this discrepancy, which version you prefer, and/or why you think the change was made!

[tanginawrites]

Edited for logic, and/or for moral implications?

It doesn’t seem logical that Dumbledore would kill Draco, even in self-defense. Dumbledore could easily incapacitate Draco with no need to use lethal force. And the idea that the Order would hunt down Draco’s mum as some sort of idk revenge is also bizarre. The Death Eaters would not expect either of those things. They’d expect “the right side” to hand Draco (and possibly his mum) over to the Ministry to be sent to Azkaban.

Introducing this idea that the Order can pretend to kill Draco and Narcissa as a cover story also leaves the uncomfortable implication that the Order is out here routinely killing people. That is not a great look for “the right side.” So it’s better to just cut those lines and leave the method of “hiding” vague.

[sideprince]

An inactive Dark Mark appeared as a faint mark on the inner part of the left forearm, similar to that of "a vivid red tattoo"; an active one was jet black.[3]Lord Voldemortplaced the Dark Mark brand on his followers' inner left forearms both as a sign of their loyalty to him and as a method of summoning them to him when he desired.[1]This was done by pressing his finger to any Death Eater'sMark, which turned it jet black and delivered a burning sensation to any person with the Dark Mark, including traitors such as Igor Karkaroff.[4][5] Feeling the burn, the Death Eaters then could Apparateto Voldemort's side, but they were not forcibly compelled to do so.[3] It is unknown whether all Death Eaters would always feel the burning, or if Voldemort could choose to signal a specific person or people.

The Dark Mark entry on the Harry Potter wiki

So does this mean Voldemort always had to have a Death Eater around if he wanted to summon any of the others? That feels oddly dependent for a guy who has trust issues and operates alone.

[st-severus]

When you need a minion so you summon a minion, but to summon a minion you need a minion-

[tanginawrites]

This is hilarious 😆 but I think there’s another explanation. I think we see Voldemort summon his Death Eaters using Wormtail’s arm in GOF because Voldemort just got a brand new body. This body doesn’t have a Dark Mark yet and he’s not going to ask Wormtail for a tattoo session whilst Wormtail is one-handed. Also he’s on a little bit of a time crunch here, trying to kill Harry Potter and portkey the corpse back to the Triwizard, and he’s got to leave time for his dramatic monologue before all that… it’s a busy evening lol.

When the trio are captured and brought to Malfoy Manor in DH, Bella summons Voldemort back from the continent by touching the Mark. Voldemort is off alone searching for the Elder Wand and is “enraged at the summons he felt — he had warned them, he had told them to summon him for nothing less than Potter.” So I think he has his own mark by this point, or at least he can feel its call.

[casasupernovas]

early snape fans, what were your first impressions? did you clock his blood heritage early? what did everyone think? did you immediately call bs when he killed dumbledore? any inklings towards lily?

[tanginawrites]

Snape was a mood from the beginning. Everyone talks about his ‘bewitching the mind’ speech. But also: “Then he could go back to hating your father’s memory in peace.” The way I felt that in my whole soul. 💀

I always thought Snape was hilarious and I lived for his catty comments. It never bothered me that he was mean, because most of the time he had a point. Pay attention in this class so you do not burn your shoes off! Harry Potter, why don’t you stop putting yourself in mortal peril for five minutes and open a textbook?

I didn’t spend much time thinking about characters’ blood status or romantic relationships as a reader, so I found out about Snape’s heritage and his relationship with Lily as they were revealed.

What side Snape was on was obvious to me and I was annoyed that this was even a subject of debate. I hated reading HBP because Harry’s suspicions and conclusions were so nonsensical. Harry being suspicious of Snape, who has saved his life multiple times at this point….. You and all your friends would have died in the Dept of Mysteries if it weren’t for Snape, kid! And Harry not ever suspecting that a potions book in the potions classroom might belong to Snape…. How is that not your first conclusion? It was mine. Everything in this book was so flipping obvious to me from the jump. When Snape killed Dumbledore and nobody thought to ask: Was there even any way that Snape could have saved him, with five or six Death Eaters standing there with their wands aimed to kill? Because if there was no way out, then the only sensible thing for A SPY to do is to maintain his cover!! Augh!!! You don’t even need to know Dumbledore was already dying to figure this out I literally still feel like screaming!!

[teacup-gathering-itself]

Imagine an eleven year old Harry Potter, fresh from the greenhouses and his first Herbology class, secretly covered in snakes under his robes. They’re just so nice, it can’t hurt to carry them around and keep them warm. They know their way around the school better than him, anyways.

Enter Professor Snape, starting his first class of Griffindor first year Potions.

“Cloaks and robes off, you will be utilizing open flames; loose, draping fabric will catch fire and send you to the hospital wing.”

Harry and a few other students keeps theirs on, trying to blend into the walls. It does not work.

“ROBES AND CLOAKS OFF. Quickly. You are wasting valuable class time.”

Harry removes his, very reluctantly. His arms and legs wriggle with garden snakes.

“Mr. Potter, what the fuck.”

“They’re my friends, professor.”

Snape walks up to Harry, helping get some of these creatures off of him.

“Why are you crawling with snakes, Mr. Potter?”

“They’re so nice, Professor Snape. Plus they told me the fastest way to your class.”

“You speak to snakes?”

“Always have, yeah.”

Snape realizes he is in no way paid enough to deal with this.

[sanctuary-angel]

Headcanon

Severus Snape won the Felix Felicis in Slughorn's class when he brewed a perfect Draught of Living Death and used the luck potion to ask Voldemort to spare Lily's life, years later.

[st-severus]

question to the void: what inconsistency in the harry potter series irritates you the most?

[tanginawrites]

I am generally annoyed by how ridiculously inept Voldemort is as a villain. But I will pick one example that I don’t see discussed enough: Why does Voldemort never use the Chamber of Secrets or the basilisk?

Voldemort has a secret chamber that only he can open that is also conveniently guarded by a basilisk. But he puts his Hogwarts horcrux in a room that he just blindly assumes no one else can get into — despite literal mountains of evidence that other people have been hiding things in here for centuries.

He loses his body and has to force himself minute-by-minute to continue to exist. Why does he fuck off to Albania if he is worried about being found by the Ministry in his weakened state when he could just hide in the Chamber?

Voldemort spends years possessing mice and rats who keep dying from too much dark magic until he finds a magical snake that can withstand magical possession… okay dude you know you have another magical snake, right? It has bigger fangs than Nagini and can also kill people using just it’s eyeballs — use that!

If the basilisk can go all over Hogwarts using the plumbing system, why does Voldemort even bother with the obstacles in Philosopher's Stone? Why doesn’t he just ride the basilisk up there?

TBH the whole series could have ended halfway through Book 1 if Voldemort decided to just release the basilisk on Halloween instead of a troll. All it has to do is slither into the Great Hall and boom — Harry Potter is dead, Dumbledore is dead, doesn't even matter who's side Snape is on because he's dead, too. This plan defeats every possible threat in one go.

No need to spend a year drinking baby bottles full of snake milk, orchestrating some elaborate plot to have Harry Potter win the Triwizard Tournament just so you can semi-publicly defeat him and prove you're still the #1 Lord of Darkness. Just use your basilisk to turn the Halloween Feast into the Red Wedding, grab that Philosopher's Stone, and walk out with your reputation secured. 🖐️🎤

[casasupernovas]

everyone says that snape only did what he did for lily therefore he is not a good person, and i would like to remind everyone that one of the biggest parts of snape's arc was him changing his raison d'etre. he's not doing it for lily, but for everyone else.

the one thing that snape needed to do to redeem himself and for her honour was to keep harry potter alive, safe from the enemy. but harry is a horcrux and horcruxes need to be destroyed in order to defeat the ultimate evil.

when severus tells dumbledore his patronus, that scene boils down to him saying "but she's my heart. i've been able to do all of this because of her." but he has to let it go. it's not for her anymore, it can't be, he has to go directly against his own hearts desires, own terrible guuit because it's bigger than that now. it's for the wizarding world. it's why he rips the photo and keeps her side. why he weeps on the floor. because it's all been for her but that's not enough anymore.

so i believe that snape was ultimately a good person. because he put aside his own personal wishes and kept pressing forward for the greater good, trying to save EVERYONE. the order, remus, harry, ron, hermione, neville, ginny, luna, the castle, everyone. all at the cost of his own life. and moreover, the last image we ever see of snape is him leaving dumbledore's office with the sword of gryffindor. the moment he shares his patronus with harry, the only person to share any part of harry's mother with him, the most neglected parent over the entire series, in order to give him strength, courage and valour, the things he needed to get the sword. and when he dies, he tells harry to take them. take the memories and essence of who lily was. a bold and brazen girl, who was not afraid to speak her mind. sound like anyone?

and he looks into his eyes. and lets lily go. and his life go. giving literally his all, to save the wizarding world.

so yes, snape is a good person.

[seastarconstellation]

Does anyone want to scream about Lily Evans and her relationship with Snape with me? I'm writing a longfic and I'm struggling a little with my characterisation.

Okay, actually. I'll start:

Lily fascinates me because we know so little, and what we do know often contradicts in very interesting ways. Who Harry’s parents were is presented as a mystery that Hary solves throughout the books. Lily appears to be even more obscured than James; he has a group of friends to tell Harry all about who he was. People seem much more hesitant to talk about Lily (the marauders mostly bring her up to talk about her green eyes. That part where Lupin talks about being close with her is movie-only), and her closest friend and family actively withhold information. There are never any Griffendor women who talk to Harry about being close to his mom. It leads me to assume that Lily, a known muggle-born from a poor town in the middle of nowhere and a known associate of Severus Snape, wasn’t quite as popular as Slughorn suggested in Hbp

I’m also going to go out on a limb and say she wasn’t quite as put together as you’d assume; she had a baby at 19 or 20, in the middle of a war. I’m really trying to put what I’ve seen happen first-hand with super young parents aside. But even when I accept that Lily was able to be a good mum at such a young age, I can’t pretend that this was a mature decision. A war was happening, and Lily and James were both prominent soldiers in it. Surely she realised how much danger they both were in.

The big bombshell is, of course, her friendship with Snape. We know they became friends at eight years old, considered each other ‘best friends' at one point, that their relationship started crumbling in the fifth year and that she officially cut him off after he called her mud blood at the lake. Other posts have already masterfully illustrated how they were torn apart because they were fundamentally unable to see things from each other's point of view. Severus talks about being bullied, then dismisses the bullying other Slytherins were doing (when Lily tells him about Mulciber using dark magic on a student he waves her off. “That was just a laugh.”). Lily, on her end, seems very eager to believe Griffendor's gossip over her supposed best friend when it comes to the shrieking shack incident. They’re both hypocrites. Completely ignoring each other's issues while blaming the other for not acknowledging their own. So one thing leads to another, Snape yells a slur and Lily decided that enough is enough. Which makes sense, it’s not her responsibility to fix him if he’s starting to get radicalised. There’s a certain tragedy in baby Sneeple being thrown in the dungeon with a bunch of wannabe-death eaters at eleven, but again, that was not for her to fix.

But I’m still completely baffled by the fact that she laughed. Whywhywhy did Joanne(derogatory) write that. That’s your best friend being publically humiliated and borderline sexually assaulted, what in the hell are you smiling for. I’ve tried to argue that she’s not laughing at Snape, she’s getting flustered by James’ antics. But no, that doesn’t make sense either. At that point, she’s still very turned off by him, and she calls him a toerag only a few lines later. His show-off is precisely what she dislikes about him. This would not be charming to her even if she already had a crush.

One explanation I’ve seen is that the friendship was one-sided from Snape’s end. She pitied him when they were kids, got sick of him at Hogwarts and then dragged this dead horse of a friendship around for five years before finding a way out. Meaning that she laughed because she genuinely thought Snape being bullied was funny. And to be honest, I hate this interpretation. It’s just sad, but not in an interesting way. There’s no tragedy there. It reminds me of those fanfics on Wattpad where the love interest was only fake-dating Y/N as a joke.

It’s wildly unrealistic, renders Snape’s sacrifice kind of meaningless, makes him seem like a total idiot and her like an evil harpy. I’m rejecting it on principle.

So… then what? Lily just has a lack of empathy? Demonic possession? Honestly, it seems as likely that Joanne(derogatory) had not quite figured out what their relationship was supposed to be. Because it makes perfect sense if they don’t really know each other, doesn’t it? The smile emphasises that Snape is socially ostracised. The fact that she composes herself emphasises that Lily is a moral figure and does not approve of James’ conduct.

If you have another interpretation that makes sense, please tell me! I’d love to know how others are reading this scene because I feel it’s essential to her characterisation but I’m just not quite able to get there yet.

[tanginawrites]

The least-objectionable explanation I could come up with for Lily's almost-smile in SWM is that everyone is just totally shocked by Snape's unusual choice of underpants. I wrote a whole unnecessary headcanon about SWM and wizard underwear typically being a lot more modest than a pair of muggle y-fronts. Basically, Lily's furious expression twitches for a moment because even she's thinking, 'Oh my Merlin. Sev, what are you wearing?'

Also, I think it's important to remember what happens right before Snape's underpants are exposed. While James is distracted by Lily's presence, Snape casts something presumably dark that slices James's face and spatters his robes with blood. James doesn't respond to this violence with more violence, but instead hoists Snape up by the ankle -- embarrassing him instead of physically hurting him.

Given this context, and Lily and Sev's earlier argument about dark magic, it's not totally surprising that she finds James's method of disarming Snape a little bit amusing. She can be sympathetic to Snape and still think some kind of punishment is warranted for him attacking someone with dark magic when their back was turned. James doesn't start threatening to take Snape's underpants off until after Lily leaves. Initially, seeing Snape's underwear is just a surprising little moment of comeuppance, which she resists outright laughing at because Snape is still her friend, and she immediately tells James to let him down.

I do agree that Lily reads as an unsympathetic person at times. I get the sense that Lily wasn't wholly sympathetic about the bullying, and by 5th year that she thought Snape brought a lot of this stuff on himself. When they talk about the werewolf incident Lily says she heard that Snape went "sneaking down that tunnel by the Whomping Willow, and James Potter saved you from whatever's down there." She has no interest in whatever's down there. She heard that Snape went skulking around, and James Potter pulled him out of danger, and as far as she's concerned Snape didn't tell her about this incident because he was the instigator and got himself into this mess.

Maybe Lily ended up dating and later marrying one of Snape's bullies because Snape never told her the extent of James's transgressions. Or maybe, she ended up with James because she's fine with a little bullying as long as she has the veneer of moral superiority. 🤷

[ramifonverg]

Severus and Lily

[sxvxrxssnape]

i honestly cannot get the idea of snape bowing sarcastically at umbridge out of my head. snape outrunning a hippogriff. snape writing poetry. severus "would you like me to do it now? or would you like a few moments to compose an epitaph?" snape. snape referring to himself in the third person when he comes up behind harry and ron in cos "or maybe, he's waiting to hear why you two did not arrive on the school train". snape hiding behind a suit of armor and walking out with a dramatic "it is i, severus snape!". robes billowing. the scowling. peaceing tf out by literally throwing himself out the window.

why do people hate this man. he's hilarious.

[tanginawrites]

The Marauders didn't stop bullying Snape after the prank. It actually got worse.

A lot of people are surprised to realize that the scene in Snape's Worst Memory happens after the werewolf prank. When first reading OOTP, people generally assumed that SWM showed escalating tension between the Marauders and Snape that up led to the prank. But in DH, we see Snape and Lily talking about the prank before SWM. This means that the Marauders are still singling Snape out and targeting him after prank. Why?

My theory is that the bullying actually got worse after the prank. Because the only way to hold their friend group together was for the Marauders to double down and rally around blaming Snape for what happened.

Think about it: How did that incident not tear them apart? Sirius not only exposed Lupin's secret – he also attempted to use Lupin as a weapon against Snape, and he could have gotten James killed in the process. That's a huge betrayal.

But Sirius isn't mature enough to take responsibility for it. Lupin isn't self-confident enough to confront Sirius about it. "James would-consider-it-the-height-of-dishonor-to-mistrust-his-friends Potter" isn't going to be the one to lay blame on Sirius or break up the group. But it's too big an issue to ignore. The only way they can get over this is to put it all on Snape. It was just a joke, and Snape is an idiot, and James is a hero.

If you compare the two incidents that the books show us of the Marauders bullying Snape, you can see that totally different dynamics are driving the bullying. This shows how and why the bullying got worse after the prank.

The first bullying incident we see is on the Hogwarts Express, when James and Sirius engage in verbal bullying of Snape, with one small attempt at tripping him up as he leaves. This bullying is a form of bonding for James and Sirius and forms the basis of their friend group. This is an example of bullying driven by Peer Group factors (source), and this sort of bullying is generally done to:

to attain or maintain social power or to elevate their status in their peer group.

to show their allegiance to and fit in with their peer group.

to exclude others from their peer group, to show who is and is not part of the group.

What we're seeing here is that the soon-to-be Marauders are in new environment and they're defining their peer group and establishing social hierarchy, trying to establish their status. The Marauders continue in this pattern of Peer Group bullying throughout their school career, as evidenced by the detention records Snape has Harry transcribe in HBP. The Marauders seem to have thrown out hexes in a scattershot way to establish superiority over other students and look cool. This casual, incidental sort of bullying is likely what Snape experienced for the first several years of school.

But what we see in SWM isn't bullying to maintain Peer Group dynamics. This bullying isn't just flinging a single insult or a clever hex. James and Sirius hunt Snape, they deprive him of his wand and ability to escape the situation, and they repeatedly hex him until Lily (temporarily) stops them. This incident is extremely personal. This is an example of bullying driven by Emotional factors, and this type of bullying is done when the bullies:

have feelings of insecurity and low self-esteem, so they bully to make themselves feel more powerful.

don’t know how to control their emotions, so they take out their feelings on other people.

may not have skills for handling social situations in healthy, positive ways.

What we're seeing here is all the fraying edges of the Marauders' friendship. Sirius has just damaged their group, but he can't apologize or address it without accepting blame, so he has to take his emotions out on Snape. Punishing Snape is a way to exorcise his guilt. And it's actually imperative that he bully Snape into silence, because he is the one who has revealed Lupin's secret to Snape and put them all in jeopardy. Lupin can't confront Sirius about the betrayal of trust, and likewise he can't confront his friends here. Not only does Lupin not have the emotional security for handling this situation, he also can't risk putting himself in front of Snape in this moment, lest Snape scream "Werewolf" instead of "Mudblood." James is here trying to work through his own insecurities – in bullying Snape he is defending his friends, but James is also trying to get Lily's attention. James offers to change his ways if she'll give him a chance, because James needs to reassure himself that he is chivalrous, that he is a hero.

Looking at the way the bullying dynamics change and escalate in those two scenes, I think it’s clear that Lupin’s line, “Snape was a special case. I mean, he never lost an opportunity to curse James so you couldn't really expect James to take that lying down,” is an understatement.

Snape was a special case because he knew Lupin’s secret, which would always make him a potential threat. The Marauders would always take any opportunity they could to reinforce that Snape was powerless to do anything to them. And they’d continue to take out all their emotions about the prank on Snape rather than confronting each other.

[phantomgrimalkin-deactivated202]

Snape: Who can tell me how to distinguish between a wolf a werewolf?

Hermione: Wolves have been extinct in this country since the 18th century, so if you see a wolf here you should assume it's a werewolf.

Snape:

Snape: 15 points from Gryffindor