Well, definitely not Loki and Thor, because brothers, and I'm not into that.

I'm happy to read fic, but most of my creative energy has been going into work.

but most of my creative energy has been going into work.

"I felt a great disturbance in the Fandom, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened."

Just realized the mucinex I took a couple hours ago was in fact sudafed. Tonight might prove odd.

Dangit. I think Emmett has grown again. My eye-level is directly even with his teeth. I think he's six feet tall.

He said he woke up this morning and looked at his feet and thought, "Why are my feet so far away from me?"

He said he woke up this morning and looked at his feet and thought, "Why are my feet so far away from me?"

Even to this day I occasionally think that.

I can't remember if it's Cosby or Garrison Keillor or who that spoke of lying in the backyard as a teenager watching his feet get farther and farther away.

We blew off the memorial today. It was just more than we could handle, and we have the last three weeks of school to get through still. I dunno if it was the right call.

But my eyebrow is twitchy again tonight, so I'm obviously still pretty stressed. Solution: lots of Pottermore tonight and Avengers tomorrow.

Hey Liese, do you putter around on Pottermore? Now that I've gotten through the chapters, I am wondering how much sticking power the site has. It should allow messaging, then it'd be more fun.

He said he woke up this morning and looked at his feet and thought, "Why are my feet so far away from me?"

I remember thinking something similar about my boobs.

Yeah, they've said that there won't ever be direct messaging. Which, I suppose with a userbase well into two million, I could see why not. People chat in the general hall or the houses, but it's a little wonky.

I'm on there a good bit, because I am the sort of person who can type the same eight letters or whatever a million times in a row and not get bored. It's the same thing that used to make me a good coder.

When we took our nephew to the children's museum in Indianapolis, there was this one display about archaeology. There were two parts to it, one where you could use boards to build a wall, demonstrating how dig sites were shored up. The other part was about clearing debris. There were these big foam "boulders" that filled up this tunnel. The kids were supposed to dig the boulders out and cart them over to this chute.

Only the chute led directly back into the tunnel, with a certain amount of delay. So the kids inside the tunnel never noticed and the kids outside at the chute never communicated. Voila, endless play.

Only my nephew is the son of two linguists and is a smart cookie. After a while of happy play, he decided they weren't making enough progress, and perhaps the game needed to be taken up a level. So he started taking down the boards from the other section of the display and using them to block up the back of the tunnel so the boulders wouldn't keep coming down. He was organizing the other kids to help him hold up the boards. Of course, this stopped the actual progress of the play, but he didn't mind, and was near claiming total victory.

Over the game's designers, anyway.

I bring it up, because I feel like until more functionality opens up in Pottermore, that's kind of what's happening. Each of the houses is contentedly battling with each other to have the most points at any given moment. Only they do so at the risk of points to the other houses. So the overall point totals go up, but there's really no endgame. The players vaguely believe there will be a house cup awarded, but right now there's no real incentive from the game designers to have that happen.

And so we keep on carrying the boulders over to the chute.

I still think it's fun at the moment, though, so I don't mind the repetition. It's not infinitely renewable, though, and there are lots of things (like uses for the items, ways to earn galleons (a real economy), etc.) that would add to gameplay down the road. But I don't have any clear idea if any of that is intended.

The chapters were lovely, the art for the moments beautiful, and once I had all the books and objects and cards and coins, yeah, it was pretty much dueling. With the one most powerful spell. Over and over.