The Harry Potter Alliance is in the last 33 hours of its Equality FTW campaign. So if, like me, you waited until the last minute to donate, YOU SHOULD WAIT NO LONGER. The HPA is a great organization: They work with This Star Won’t Go Out, facilitated several Projects for Awesome, and their campaigns to promote equal access to education and LGBT rights are truly made of awesome. There are lots of cool perks to go along with the pleasure of donating to a great charity, including a bit of failed writing by me and a Wizard Rock EP by Hank. Check it out at equalityftw.org. And hurry!
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The Harry Potter Alliance is in the last 33 hours of its Equality FTW campaign. So if, like me, you waited until the last minute to donate, YOU SHOULD WAIT NO LONGER.

The HPA is a great organization: They work with This Star Won’t Go Out, facilitated several Projects for Awesome, and their campaigns to promote equal access to education and LGBT rights are truly made of awesome.

There are lots of cool perks to go along with the pleasure of donating to a great charity, including a bit of failed writing by me and a Wizard Rock EP by Hank. Check it out at equalityftw.org. And hurry!

Equality FTW

The Harry Potter Alliance has organized a campaign called Equality FTW. They’re raising money to continue the awesome work they’ve done to ensure equal opportunity for all kinds of neglected populations: from undocumented immigrants to LGBTQ people to children in underserved community.

There are several cool perks: You can get a wizard rock Hank EP or the first 6,000 words of my abandoned story THE SEQUEL or (as I chose) get the Potter Puppet Pals to hold a sign with your name on it.

But most importantly, you’ll be giving to an organization that has meant a lot to nerdfighteria for a long time (they facilitated many of the early Projects for Awesome) and also meant a lot to Esther Earl (the HPA also has partnered with This Star Won’t Go Out).

So they’ve helped us a lot over the years. Please join me in helping them continue the fight for equal rights and equal access.

hermionejg:

a particularly good episode of HankGames in which John talks about why he’s a Liverpool fan — may or may not have made me cry like a little girl. For years and years when I was little I’d sit on the sofa and watch West Ham play with my dad and sing I’m forever blowing bubbles and later, paolo di canio x4083980 and it’s just such an important part of my childhood. My grandpa was an Everton supporter and in Mexico everyone I know supports the Pumas — you have your team, you have your ties. I’d never really thought of that being one of my earliest introductions to fandom, fan history and so on, but I suppose it was. 

(Thanks, Rosi.) I think one of the things that is underappreciated in fan communities like the HP fandom or Doctor Who or whatever is the extent to which it really IS similar to, say, the Liverpool fandom. Obviously, I’m not defending all of sporting fan culture, but to me it has been a way to connect to a story (the history of my football club) in a deep way that also connected me to other people (fellow supporters) and allowed me to feel like a participant in the narrative (In soccer, fan support really is the lifeblood of a club, because the club is not guaranteed to continue as a professional organization the same way teams are in most American sports.)

Anyway, in the end, my relationship with Liverpool is not so different from my relationship with Harry Potter.

As Harry Potter was the only other thing I was passionate about, the doctors gave consent for me to leave the hospital and collect the fifth Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, from the local book shop. I was so ecstatic to have the book and excited to begin reading it, but there was never any hint of your imminent arrival and the way you would change my life so drastically. Luna, you instantly captivated me. I didn’t know why but there was something about you with your upside-down magazine, straggly blonde hair, and the honest, abashed way you stared at people without blinking that fascinated and perplexed me at once. You laughed hysterically at one of Ron’s quips and didn’t stop to excuse yourself and feel ashamed when it became clear that everyone found you strange. Throughout the book, I found myself waiting for your brief appearances and wanting to know more about you and why you were the way you were. You baffled me, not because you were odd (though indeed you were), but because you were… perfect. But it was a different kind of perfect to the perfectly thin, smiling magazine girls I simultaneously idolised and reviled. It was the way you carried your oddness like it was the most natural thing in the world. You didn’t market your oddness as your defining feature the way some insecure teenagers do, in guise of confidence and security. And nor were you oblivious to the awkward and uncomfortable feelings your oddness provoked in others. When, unable to comprehend how you wore your oddness so honestly and unashamedly, your peers reverted to mockery and bullying, you recognised this as a reflection of their own deep-seated insecurity and calmly let them carry on, quite above your head. You weren’t trying hard to present a certain aspect of yourself that would boldly identify you in the world. And that’s when it occurred to me how bizarre and positively ridiculous it was to apply the word “weird” to describe you, when you represented the most natural and unpretentious state possible to be; you were yourself.

Evanna Lynch, in part of her Dear Mr. Potter letter, where she describes first reading about Luna while in a recovery programme for anorexia (via holymotherofhnng)

Wow, Evanna Lynch is a really good writer! (Preorder Dear Mr. Potter. I’ve got a letter in there, too!)

(via robofillet)

Source: holymotherofrowling