Welcome to the madhouse.

As my partner Mitchell says in his introductory post here, this is where we rant about things that make us angry, be they fictional or sadly all too real. With an occasional emphasis on Harry Potter. There’s eventually going to be a shred of the complete series since we both love to hate it. Look forward to that, it’s going to be fun. We’ll also be talking about writing and storytelling tropes, atheism, philosophy and other random topics. It won’t all be angry ranting, I promise.

You’ll get to know a few things about our families here too. Both our respective pairs of parents have problematic attitudes when it comes to certain things, they – particularly our mothers – will often say or do something to spark a blog post. We do love them really, I swear. I have an older brother and Mitchell a younger sister, who may or may not also feature here but probably not in an angry context. Mitchell also has a dog who may or may not be an alien manipulative catsquirreldemon. There may be photos. I’ll have to make do with cat macros like so many other bloggers, though, since I’m currently pet-less.

Anyway, I’m Loten. A lot of you probably ended up here via my fanfiction profile, so you probably have at least a vague idea who I am. For those of you who don’t, I’m a 26 year old woman who also spends way too much time on the Internet. I have a zoology degree for some reason (it seemed like a good idea at the time), and I tend to drift from temporary job to temporary job. You’ll know if I’m working or not by whether I’m ranting about the British unemployment system. I live in the UK, Wales to be specific, and I spend my time reading, writing and complaining, mostly.

We’re both slightly insane. Don’t let that put you off.

 

Point Stick, Vent Spleen? (Or: Who are we, exactly?)

If you’ve somehow made it here, congratulations! You’ve found our blog. I hope that’s what you were looking for. Stay awhile, and listen?

You may be excused for wondering who we are; sometimes we do the same, so I’ll forgive it this once. My name is Mitchell (I post here as mcbender); I’m a currently unemployed 25-year-old guy who spends too much time on the internet. I have a Master’s degree in electrical engineering which isn’t doing me much good, and I spend much more of my time reading and thinking about atheism, feminism, philosophy, ethics, literature and storytelling than anything else. Mostly I’m a disgruntled person who likes to get angry about things.

I’ll allow my partner to introduce herself. There’s a much better chance you know who she is than who I am.

If you’re curious about the etymology of the blog title – aside from being a pretty good first-order approximation of what we do here (“look, an awful thing! let us tell you how it makes us angry!”), it comes from a disparaging way we refer to the magic system in the Harry Potter series: “point stick, say word”. We’re probably more fixated on Harry Potter than is healthy – for fuck’s sake, we met through Harry Potter fanfiction! – even if on the whole we don’t have a very high opinion of it. We’ll get into all the reasons why eventually, I’m sure; stick around if that interests you.