Power cable linking UK and Ireland now passes near Bronze Age human burial remains instead of fictional grave on Welsh beach
Update: further information by @[email protected] in the comments below
They’ll do anything but acknowledge they’re funding the legal discrimination of trans people in the UK.
I for one am glad they’re leaving this gender neutral toilet alone
Who the fuck cares about Dobby’s grave!
Cult behavior.
I don’t give a fuck about HP Whatshercunt, but I do love this story. Because it shows that collectively we have more power then these companies. If we could get our shit together and stop fighting each other we could bully them into litterally anything we want because THERE ARE MORE OF US. It’s so dumb that we have let a tiny group of people convince us, the larger group that massively outnumbers them, they have all the power in the relationship.
It was a … power cable. To connect the Irish grid to the welsh/English grid. To allow for more efficient transfer of power between renewable generation to the respective grids based on availability and need.
It was actually a good project? Like unironically. It was going to allow for further decarbonization. Now it’s been delayed and going to cost a lot more, and may have to go through a Bronze Age burial site now.
The people who blocked the project were also disturbing the local environment by leaving huge amounts of synthetic fiber socks at the beach.
Yeah, it’s a pretty wholesome story about a group of fans caring about something fun, the company playing along … and everyone ended up happy in the end.
Well, not entirely … one small comment section of indomitable lemmies still holds out against the joy!
Power cable linking UK and Ireland now passes near Bronze Age human burial remains instead of fictional grave on Welsh beach
Just another story about people making the real world a little worse because they’re disconnected from reality.
Do you also applaud antivaxxers get together and bully people? Same thing isn’t it? People disconnected from reality bullying people.
Sorry, but people disconnected from reality aren’t capable of making any improvement in the world.
“Sorry, too busy attacking political allies for disagreeing with me on a point or two.”
Which two points are you talking about? Would it happen to be:
- Blocking strikes
- Supporting genocide
Because people who support those things are not allies.
A brief glance at their profile shows they mostly spend their time on the fediverse dropping incendiary comments in politically charged threads; we may never get clarification.
I’m here. Just waiting for you to answer the question.
It didn’t seem like a good faith question so I didn’t bother answering, but it seems at least one person in the shadows thinks it was, so I’ll answer it:
I was thinking of people who think the Uyghur genocide is fake news, the Holodomor was an accident and Ukraine ought to be a Russian territory again, and the DPRK is a wonderful place to live. If you disagree with that on the fediverse, there tends to be much gnashing of teeth from certain people who otherwise make sane political arguments about the biggest evils we currently face, at least in my country (e.g. Epstein Class Bad, Trump Bad, Fascism Bad).
As for your two points, I haven’t met anyone who supports genocide or the blocking of labor strikes, so I don’t know why you thought those up.
You accuse me of asking a question in bad faith and then act like you’re living under a rock? Labor issues and genocide support are at the forefront of current political discussions. I can’t remember the last time an American politician mentioned the Uyghurs.
As for your two points, I haven’t met anyone who supports genocide or the blocking of labor strikes, so I don’t know why you thought those up.
Joe Biden went around congress twice to ship weapons to Israel in support of their genocide. Joe Biden, 44 Democratic senators and 36 Republican senators passed a bill to block the rail strike in 2022. Were you unaware of this?
I feel like you over-specific’ed my meme into an apparent attack on me or my position(s)?
I don’t see an answer to my question anywhere in this comment.
It didn’t seem like a good faith question so I didn’t bother answering, but it seems at least one person in the shadows thinks it was, so I’ll answer it:
I was thinking of people who think the Uyghur genocide is fake news, the Holodomor was an accident and Ukraine ought to be a Russian territory again, and the DPRK is a wonderful place to live. If you disagree with that on the fediverse, there tends to be much gnashing of teeth from certain people who otherwise make sane political arguments about the biggest evils we currently face, at least in my country (e.g. Epstein Class Bad, Trump Bad, Fascism Bad).
As for your two points, I haven’t met anyone who supports genocide or the blocking of labor strikes, so I don’t know why you thought those up.
Any grave site more than a hundred years old that isnt well preserved is actually exactly as fictional as dobbys grave. Neither person is in there, after all…
Except we can and have learned volumes from the past by studying grave sites, but that doesn’t work for fictional sites.
“How did Donald Trump win in the US? How could so many people be so stupid and out of touch with reality?”
Harry Potter fans force relocation of £430m undersea cable to avoid Dobby’s ‘grave’
probably not true, fortunately: https://old.reddit.com/r/ukpolitics/comments/1vjde6y/rumours_speculation_questions_and_reaction/p2t4b8m/
RedLib link: https://redlib.shreven.org/r/ukpolitics/comments/1vjde6y/rumours_speculation_questions_and_reaction/p2t4b8m/
(RedLib is a private, FOSS frontend for viewing Reddit.)
I am not creating an account to view that
Fuck that. Login???
Yeah, if you open Fuckweddit and look at a page for long enough it covers the entire page with a big LOG IN OR SIGN UP to block contents
That’s why I’m here
Never I let google steal the info
This is actually a win. The original site was going through an ecological sensitive area. People fought to protect the “grave” of a fictional character but accidentally protected a delicate ecology. That is more important than protecting the dead, real or not.
Fans of the wizard series come to leave stones reading “Here Lies Dobby” despite being asked not to by the land owner, the National Trust, because the beach is an ecologically sensitive site.
The HP obsessive are also littering that sensitive sight with a bunch of socks.
Also the cable was for sharing load between grids to account for variability in power generation in renewables. It was literally being built to support further decarbonization of the grid.
Oh and now the cable might have to go through a Bronze Age burial site.
Like, this is not a win, this is idiots making a good project more expensive and difficult and potentially causing the destruction of an archeological site.
Gotta love that a fictional character created by a transphobe carries more weight and concern than the further destruction of our biosphere.
People are leaving rocks at the site of the “grave”, which they’ve repeatedly been told not to do, specifically because of concerns about harm to the environment. So they might have accidentally helped in some respect, but it doesn’t exactly mean much when they’re showing up themselves, and fucking it up anyway
I had a small inkling of hope that “dobby’s grave” was something unrelated to hary pooper
wow this sucks
If you want to visit an interesting, more meaningful grave, visit “Sambo’s” grave on Sunderland Point.
Jesus Christ, they’re not even good children’s books
The first four are decent monster of the week fare.
The last three remind me of bad fanfiction. The attempt to pull it all together into some sort of grand storyline is pathetic. The Horcruxes and Deadly Hallows crap was clearly pulled out of her ass at the last minute.
They are quite shit. They are easy reads, and it gets children to read, that’s pretty good. But damn, shit makes no sense, and harry potter adults are pretty damn weird.
and dobby was the most poorly written one.
Not the Jewish bankers or Irish bomber?
they weren’t Jewish, they were goblins…
There is a historical relation between their stories. So it is a pretty convenient mistake that her history doesn’t afford much leeway in.
I like the books, hate the writer
Plus the Author is a bigot.
It’s, of course, a matter of taste whether or not you find them good. But let’s not pretend that were not taking about one of he most popular, best-selling children’s book series of all time that spawned a 30+ billion dollar franchise of movies, merch, games, and a theme park. Plenty of people found them plenty good enough to generate that big of a financial success.
I do think a lot of that popularity was because it came out when internet forums were a novelty. If you’re used to only one or two people liking the same book as you, then you see thousands liking the same book, that book must be popular.
Then the popularity fed itself. Movies, merch, games, everything was done to capitalise on the “popularity” of a new series, and this introduced it to a new audience. Media started to talk about the new book series that people were going mad for. People who didn’t read the books wanted to find out what everyone was talking about. Time passes, and people look back on the books with nostalgia goggles. Even you, when defending the book, can only point to its popularity as an argument.
The actual book doesn’t matter. It’s popular because it’s popular.
Even you, when defending the book, can only point to its popularity as an argument.
Well, that’s a bad assumption. I was appealing to it popularity and financial value because that is a real objective measure that indicates that people liked the series. I didn’t argue with someone on the internet who declared that the books were bad, full stop, over my subjective perception of its merits and quality becuase that is a pointless argument to have. Not to mention, likely one to be met with open hostility on Lemmy. No thanks.
First, it’s only a measure that people consume the media, not that they enjoy it. Hate-watching is a thing, as you can tell from a comment higher up. Or they watched because someone else wanted to watch (or they thought someone else wanted to watch).
Second, enjoyment does not reflect quality. People can like bad media. I like the second D&D movie, and even I can only rate it’s quality as “fine”.
Third, even at the height of its popularity and among its strongest fans, there are flaws galore in the books. Even ignoring the racism, sexism, ablism, slavery, “ugly is bad” mindset, and all that, there’s also stupid plot decisions and lazy world building. Of all the fanfics on AO3, well over a third of them are fix-fics.
Fan merch doesn’t sell for “fine”. Theme parks aren’t floated on hate-watching. People don’t spend $30 billion ironically. Yea, those things factor in, but they are clearly not the main drivers. And flaws do not make a work not good overall. I’m the first to admit it is flawed, for every reason you mentioned and more. But none of that makes it bad.
There is fan merch of The Room. Theme parks don’t need a popular franchise connected to be popular, so long as there’s a rollercoaster and something fun for the whole family. People will happily spend money on nostalgia and fitting in with others, or on gifts for someone you think likes the thing.
All of this is, once again, an appeal to popularity. It has nothing to do with the quality of the books. And you saying the book isn’t bad despite bad plot, world, characters and implications just condemns your judgement.
You know you are being disingenuous. You know plenty of people enjoy(ed) the series. This is a stupid pedantic argument.
And we all know that popular equals quality
Popular doesn’t mean great, of course, but it does mean it was at least good enough to be enjoyed by a lot of people. If it were objectively bad, as in it had no good qualities at all, it wouldn’t be popular.
Harry Potter is very well written. Like leagues beyond what you typically get for youth fiction/young adult.
You should read His Dark Materials or The Old Kingdom. Both series are much, much more thoughtfully or together. Their plotting and characterization really put HP to shame.
Not to mention Alcatraz vs the Evil Librarians (younger audience) and Skyward (true YA audience).
Harry Potter is very well written. Like leagues beyond what you typically get for youth fiction/young adult.
, they said loftily.
You’ve only got “UK AKSHULLY NO IT ISNT LALALALA” responses, and I feel obligated to speak up for my late (queer fan) friend and say I’m not a fan but they are completely fine books written better then a shit ton of other books for kids. I’ve read the first four and found them to be between “serviceable” and “great”. They were no “Animorphs” to me, but at no point did I find myself thinking “this is boring and sucks”, so people saying they’re straight-up bad are nuts or just being disingenuous.
If the author wasn’t a mad cunt, I guarantee most of the people saying they’re shit wouldn’t be saying that.
If she hadn’t become a vociferous anti civil rights activist the reality is a lot of us would still be tired of the books and frustrated with elements of them, but there’d be less anger when they come up. There were plenty of people getting real sick of how popular they’d remained in the mid 10s.
I read them all as a kid and loved them, but I was definitely tired of how much cultural space they took up for so fucking long. And the criticisms are valid, the books did an amazing job of inspiring obsession in a kid of the time, they felt like they grew with me, they had so much room to imagine in, and they were also full of holes, mid prose, and the sort of issues I’m kinda shocked my parents didn’t feel the need to have a conversation about.
But also, would people be as vocal about these issues if it wasn’t the largest media franchise under individual control and controlled by someone who has funded massive rollbacks in rights for a group she’s bigoted towards? Obviously not, we’d just still be saying to read another book, not arguing not to continue purchasing products from the franchise.
It’s not well very written, even by youth / young adult standards.
It’s not poorly written either mind.
Have you actually gone back and read any of the copious amounts of ya books?
Off the top of my head – go and reread a Goosebumps book. They are super simple. HP is downright shakespearian compared to them.
Hardy boys, tom swift series (80s/90s versions) and countless other one shot books that I can barely remember are all super simple too.
Yes, there are always outliers like Redwall but when compared to the whole HP was well written regardless of the trash person who wrote them.
None of that changes the fact she isn’t a good writer.
It’s really not well written, by classical standards. It’s very colorful and fun and entertaining. But the story and plot constantly use “deus ex machina”. Just try an summarize the actions and plot of the movie, it makes no sense whatsoever. Really the story is garbage, but the characters and adventure still makes it fun.
I think that is a feature of a many modern “web novels” or fan fiction. A sort of liberation of the shackles of good writing. Web novels democratized authorship in a way. We really have far more entertaining authors with much more talent than was made to believe (Tangent: A bit like porn today, now that everybody can do it on their own, from their home without some creepy porn producer, we have far better and more creative porn than ever). Most people are creative and pretty good as amateur writers. They just haven’t learned the craft of writing a good story lol (cannot be said about Rowlings though, she should have known better).
Why some things become a hit and others not is an unsolved question. If we could answer that, book publishing and movie studios would work very differently. Don’t ascribe to quality which can equally be ascribed to luck or marketing.
Its pretty mid.
I was a book kid, who grew up and was 13 to 17 during the release of the HP series.
I read mountains of YA books and adult alike. Spent tonnes of weekend days at the library.
HP was okay, it wasnt bad.
But it wasnt the best either. I would absolutely say stuff like Sabriel and the Bartimaeus trilogy were substantially better.
Oh and dont even get me started on Redwall, Jacques was an amazing writer who knew how to craft incredible worlds.
By comparison to those, Id score HP closer to a 6 or so.
I love you. THE goddamn Bartimaeus Trilogy. I have been searching “bartholomew djinn adventure” “bartoman magic series” and “funny djinni soup” for SO long. Im gonna go fucking read those books again. Various forms of praise for you, etc.
Sabriel and Redwall were my jam as a kid. I still revisit the Abhorsen series from time to time. Basically I reread them all when Nix releases a new book.
hey now, lets not try to get people to realize that other people’s opinions matter.
What I don’t get is, how did Dobby get so much love in the Harry Potter fandom while Jar-Jar Binks in Star Wars got so much hate? They were both insufferably annoying characters.
I get that Dobby has fans; what I don’t get is why the same wasn’t extended to Jar-Jar.
Jar-Jar didn’t die, I guess, but I feel like even if he did, fans would glaze him over decades later. They’d say “good riddance” and that would be that.
Jar-Jar was introduced at a time when everyone had spent twenty years forming their idea of what a Star Wars movie should be like and he ran totally counter to that. Dobby was introduced in the second instalment of his series.
Personally, I am a fan of the Darth Jar-Jar hypothesis. In light of recent real-world history, it has become very plausible.
I never dug too deeply into that one, but from what I’ve heard, I want it to be true.
Yoda showed us that we didn’t hate characters who spoke grammatically differently from the rest. Yoda was never annoying, though. Personally I just felt like Jar Jar was rather pointless.
Harry Potter was mostly kids watching and their families. Phantom Menace had to also cater to adult-shaped children who lost their collective shit after realizing Star Wars is actually a kids movie franchise made to sell toys and merchandising and licensing deals to children and continue on into adult hood.
Jar jar was racist
I couldn’t stand Dobby. Didn’t shed a tear when he died. Fred, on the other hand…
As someone who read 4 HP books back in 2001-2 and only saw the first 2 movies, I was deeply annoyed by that goblin. Maybe I didn’t see “the good part” of the character?
My wife cried when Dobby died. I couldn’t have cared less, thing showed up for like 10 seconds, pulled a Deus Ex Machina and died. Congrats, you served your purpose random Red Shirt.
You didn’t read the book
I read the book, I read **all ** the main series books. Dobby was as useful as Cho Chang to the story, minus one scene.
Because Harry Potter fans, including the adults are children.
I am 58. I’ve read War and Peace, Ulysses, LOTR and the Harry Potter series and that’s fine because I’m not an insecure child.
PS fuck JKR.
And Star Wars fans are not?
Are we talking about all the people who’ve been Star Wars fans during the nearly 50 years that it’s existed, or the people who are still fans in 2026? I’d agree that Star Wars’ current fanbase is made up of insecure children, since everyone else checked out long ago.
Star Wars fans at their worse are more like adult teenagers. The types that made it their whole personality.
When you tell a HP fan that they shouldn’t give Rowling money, they whine like a spoiled child having their candy taken away.
Different children.
They are both children, the adults of which should feel ashamed for liking such basic crap
No fun allowed 😠
You’re the literary equivalent of a full-grown adult that eats nothing but chicken nuggets and fries. At some point you’ll have to expand your palette…
As if I actively read Harry Potter. It’s a kids book. Walking superiority complex over here, try being less of a dick. No one is saying Harry Potter is the peak of modern literature.
I happen to think you should feel ashamed for judging what people harmlessly enjoy. Guess we each have our pet peeves.
Harry Potter is the cash cow intellectual property of a billionaire who’s made it her life’s goal to eradicate trans women.
If you’re an HP fan and think it’s harmless, you’re showing the world exactly what kind of person you are.
I am not ashamed to judge you for your shitty morals and lack of taste.
It isn’t harmless and we should be boycotting it. There’s a big difference in saying it sucks because of the author and it sucks because of the content though.
It’s fun and deeply anchored in nostalgia. Let’s not pretend it isn’t entertaining. I won’t even pirate the new series regardless because of the author’s lunacy, but still.
What do you think all capitalist enshittified art and literature amounts to, if not easily digested nostalgia? Harry Potter is ok at best, and its fans seriously need to read another book.
No idea. I hate Dobbie deeply, and cheered when it died
Dobbie was perceived by kids aging into adults.
JarJar was perceived by adults from the start.
Probably, kids had more capacity for their bullshit?
I was a kid when Jar Jar was new, and I’m still quite fond of the character. To me he’s the best thing about the series (I don’t hold Star Wars in very high regard), so I think you’re on to something.
Jar Jar was too much of a racist caricature.
First time I’m hearing that. Anyway, I hated him way before he was racist!
So was Watto and it doesn’t get that much backlash.
That’s because the Gringotts Goblins control the galactic media.
Or the trade federation dudes
Watto and Nute Gunray weren’t portrayed as buffoons, though. Jar Jar had the double-whammy of not just referencing an ethnicity, but doing so in a gratuitously insulting way.
(Granted, Watto, being a slaveowner, was certainly not a sympathetic character either, but at least he behaved reasonably enough in the context of the story. A shrewd businessman, but not greedy or duplicitous, you know? At least Lucas stopped short of the really offensive antisemitic tropes.)
And Watto didn’t get that much screen time, did he? We establish that Ani and his mom are slaves, the racially stereotyped slave owner is a piece of shit, they buy out the slave padawan, and fuck off, right? How much mind space does Watto deserve?
As a european i have no idea what he is supposed to be a caricature of. Vaguely referencing tribalism?
Rastafari. Lucas has a bad habit of including a little casual racism in a lot of his works. Less a matter of because hateful and more a matter of being old and out of touch with certain matters.
There’s also “Small Round” and the Indian banquet from Temple of Doom and the Jewish stereotype Watto from episode 1.
I also don’t buy that as being the difference between the two. Doby was from a slave race and treated as weird for not wanting to be a slave. That’s way worse than what Lucas did.
Rastafari. Lucas has a bad habit of including a little casual racism in a lot of his works. Less a matter of because hateful and more a matter of being old and out of touch with certain matters.
I feel like it was just because he was trying to make them sound exotic/foreign/alien and wasn’t imaginative enough to make up accents from scratch.
There’s also “Small Round” and the Indian banquet from Temple of Doom and the Jewish stereotype Watto from episode 1.
There’s also the hyper-Japanese Nute Gunray from the same movie. Lucas was pretty equal-opportunity in his cultural appropriation, LOL!
I also don’t buy that as being the difference between the two. Doby was from a slave race and treated as weird for not wanting to be a slave. That’s way worse than what Lucas did.
Yeah, but that made Dobby a more sympathetic character. There was nothing like that for Jar Jar (especially since the only people that treated him badly were other Gungans, and it was earned). Dobby was oppressed and brainwashed; Jar Jar was just [very convincingly pretending to be] a clumsy oaf with a stereoptyical accent, which basically just makes him an insult to that ethnicity.
Also, keep in mind we’re talking about how people feel about the characters themselves, not how people feel about the creators’ purpose for writing them that way. So yeah, 100% agree that Rowling was way more problematic than Lucas, but that doesn’t mean Dobby was more problematic than Jar Jar.
Dobby was a pitiful creature enslaved by a bad guy who dies saving the main characters
Jar Jar was a stupid alien added to the prequel for comedic relief
was a pitiful creature enslaved by a bad guy who dies saving the main characters
Also explains why we love Anakin/Vader.
Do we, though?
It’s definitely the most popular character in the franchise.
Jar Jar was a stupid alien added to the prequel for comedic relief
Jar Jar was the big bad until they dialed up the obfuscating stupidity too high and the backlash made George Lucas chicken out.
That’s just a fan theory made up by prequel fans trying to save face.
You can watch the behind the scenes documentaries. Jar jar was always meant to be a comedic character.
I watched the original trilogy in the 90s but after seeing the jar jar movie in theaters, didn’t watch anything in the franchise until Andor.
Darth Jar Jar has always been canon and nothing will convince me otherwise
I don’t really buy Darth Jar Jar, but I can see him being an exiled Jedi. None of his “accidents” worked against the goals of the heroes and he was always where he needed to be. He felt like the drunken fool who would be revealed to a kungfu master by the end. Gin’s dismissive lines to him in episode 1 was setting up for something. The whole prequel trilogy was about the corruption of the Jedi and Jar Jar might have been exile or left because of his opposition to it.
None of his actions worked against the sith plot either. Remember that they weren’t on the side of the droid army, that was just a bad guy whose presence allowed them to manipulate the senate and jedi and set them up for their takeover/downfall. The first thing Palatine does after he’s won is orders Anakin to cut off the head of that bad guy, now that they were no longer needed.
And even though it appeared that the good guys won episode 1, in hindsight I’d call it almost a complete victory for the sith. Palpatine was chancellor, Qui Gon (who might have had the wisdom to help Anakin avoid the dark side) was dead, Anakin (who Palpatine and Plagius caused to come into existence with some force fuckery 8 years prior to ep 1) was in the jedi and was already contentious and being trained by a jedi who was not equipped to handle someone as tempermental as Anakin, and the trade federation was on the radar as a threat to the Republic. The only loss to them was their enforcer, Maul.
The outcome of the battle for Naboo didn’t matter to them. Though it was also Anakin that won that battle, despite Jar Jar’s chaotic effectiveness for their side. Without Anakin’s surprise victory, they didn’t really have a path to victory and IIRC they were pretty much surrendering when the droids suddenly went dead, so it wasn’t like Jar Jar was even winning the conflict for them.
None of his “accidents” worked against the goals of the heroes and he was always where he needed to be.
Well yeah, he was still in the “gain their trust” phase. The betrayal/reveal was going to happen in the second or third movie.
The whole prequel trilogy was about the corruption of the Jedi and Jar Jar might have been exile or left because of his opposition to it.
Jar Jar causing the corruption of Anakin, more like.
Meesa not laugh laugh
I watched Episode One when it was released and I was completely bored through the whole thing. I enjoyed the first three movies in theaters well enough, so I was surprised at how bored I was.
I watched Episode One again with my spouse who had never seen Star Wars, as a “we should watch the first three movies for Spaceballs context” like a decade ago, then watched the fourth because I remembered it being shit. The only good part in that movie is when Jarjar says “DAT SMEL STINKAWIFF”, one of the fucking worst lines ever written. We quote it often now.
I think one major difference is that Dobby is a character that was introduced quite early in the main run of the books/movies, where as Jar Jar was kind of just shoe-horned into an already bad prequel.
But I don’t want to imagine a world were Jar Jar was part of the OT.
Had Lucas not chickened out and go with the “Darth Jar-Jar” storyline maybe now Jar-Jar would be a good character for everyone.
Meesa sad now.
I was dragged along to see this by my kids. Having never seen the movies or read the book, I was expecting something substantially more than the pile of rocks with some old socks.
It’s not about the destination but the journey
The journey: drove a couple of hours to find a pile of rocks and some old socks
Stop driving.
No
