Housing Authority Of Murray: Fill & Download for Free

US: These interventionist programs to combat poverty have had unintended consequences and had to be reconsidered and reformed:Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) > Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF)Some advocates complained that the rule had the effect of breaking up marriages and promoting matriarchy (see also single-parent family).... the AFDC program tended to treat households with a cohabiting male who was not the natural father of the children much more leniently than those with a resident spouse or father of the children. This feature created a clear disincentive for marriage and also a clear incentive for divorce, because women who married face the reduction or loss of their AFDC benefits.[10]Lucy A. Williams and Jean Hardisty point to the existence of policies reacting to this perceived problem in some states such as "man-in-the-house" rule:States had wide discretion to determine eligibility and many states conditioned the receipt of welfare on the sexual morality of the mother, using "suitable home" and "man in the house" rules to disqualify many African American single mothers. The Right's Campaign Against WelfareThe "man-in-the-house" rule was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1968 (see King v. Smith).In 1984, libertarian author Charles Murray suggested that welfare causes dependency. He argued that as welfare benefits increased, the number of recipients also increased; this behavior, he said, was rational: there is little reason to work if one can receive benefits for a long period of time without having to work.[11] His later work and that of Richard J. Herrnstein and others suggested possible merit to the theory of a dysgenic effect,[12] however, the data are not entirely clear.[13] Right or wrong, this argument was among the stepping stones leading to the modification of AFDC toward Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF).Public Housing > High Density Projects > Section 8 -The Pruitt–Igoe urban project in St. Louis is a case study in the wrongheadedness of these programs. Life in this project is explored in this highly regarded documentary The Pruitt-Igoe Myth (2011).The Chicago Housing Authority approach to the high-rise warehousing of the less fortunate proved to be a failure as outlined here: Blueprint for Disaster: The Unraveling of Chicago Public Housing (Historical Studies of Urban America): D. Bradford Hunt: 9780226360867: Amazon.com: BooksA hopeful plan is presented here: Chicago hope - MIT News Office.

My husband's ex got the most amazing deal imaginable. Still, from the time he married me, and she realized that I was a high-wage earner, she was determined to make our lives miserable, no matter how many times she was told that she was not entitled to any of my money.Every single year, after he received annual pay raises, she would drag us back into court (free to her) to make him prove he was paying the proper amount of Child Support. Of course he was. When the children came to visit she packed clothes and shoes that didn't fit, so we would have to take them shopping.For two years (before Caller ID) we got 4-6 “wrong numbers" DAILY. When the telephone company put a trap on our phone, the calls stopped. We changed our number 3 times. She had PAID a sleazebag to wiretap our phone!!! The same guy broke into our new house when I was there to try to find out what we paid for it.This was WAR. We hired a new Family Court attorney and found out that, since every increase had been made gratuitously and was not enforced by any authority, the amount could legally be rolled all the way back to the initial agreement. HA! Finally, after years of utter torment, a victory. I would have preferred to have her censured in some other way instead, but that wasn't an option.It just didn't pay to try to be nice to her.

Simply put, because J.K. Rowling’s views, since first writing the series, have changed, especially after she has published the books.Likewise, her attitude as to her “ownership”, and the future direction of, Harry Potter vastly differs from the views of many Harry Potter fans, especially those fans who express their opinions online.Or, in a nutshell, I’ll title this answer “J.K. Rowling vs. the Internet”.Times have vastly changed since J.K. Rowling first outlined, planned, and began writing the Harry Potter books in the 1990’s. While most of her readership were children born, and growing up, in the 1990’s and 2000’s, and with the Internet as an increasingly important staple of the modern Western household and culture, J.K. Rowling was not.Instead, Rowling herself grew up as a member of Generation X (b. 1965), and as of the writing of this article, is 52 years old. Thus, she and her views fit more in-line with most Harry Potter fans’ parents, as opposed to the fans themselves.Due to this, there also appears to be an ever-widening generational gap between Rowling herself, and the majority of younger Harry Potter fans, the latter of whom are largely a part of the Milennial Generation. Rowling, up until recently, has proven to be more conservative than many of her fans on certain views, particularly on copyright issues, expressing her “ownership” over Harry Potter, and “fan works”.The most notable examples of this are, in chronological order:1995–1997 - The Internet begins to build global roots. The first Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Philospher’s Stone, is released. While J.K. Rowling was penning Harry Potter, the Internet was still in its infancy. At first, due to this, Rowling, unable to afford a computer - much less Internet - wrote and did her outlines for the books on “napkins” and pieces of printer paper at a local establishment in her area, the Elephant House.In 1995, only 0.4% of the world population, or 16 million users, had access to the the Internet; by the release of the first Harry Potter book in 1997, that number had risen to 1.7%, or 70 million users.As not many people had the Internet, Harry Potter first gained fame through “word of mouth” among reading and educational circles by publishers Bloomsbury (UK) and Scholastic (US), and was first promoted, and would later be come to seen for years to come, as a “children’s book”.1997 - 2004 - The Internet spreads rapidly on a global scale, ballooning from being used by 1.7% of the global population (70 million users) , to 12.7 % (~1 billion users). By 2002, the first social media website, Friendster, also appears online, garnering 3 million users by 2003.In 2003, both MySpace and LinkedIn launch online, beginning the rise of social media on the Internet. Online chat rooms are also popular.Included in the spread of “Internet culture”, and during the adolescence of social media, is the founding of several Harry Potter online communities for fans, including websites like SugarQuill, MuggleNet, the Leaky Cauldron, the Harry Potter Lexicon, Fanfiction.net, and others. There are also various fan communities founded on sites like LiveJournal.Meanwhile, Harry Potter becomes increasingly popular in mainstream culture as more books and films are released, transforming from a mere “children’s book series” into a “pop culture phenomenon”. For books, Chamber of Secrets is released in 1998; Prisoner of Azkaban, in 1999; Goblet of Fire, in 2000; and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix in 2003.As the Internet is increasingly integrated into Western schools, and J.K. Rowling conducts online “chat room interviews” with school-children, Harry Potter fan fiction and discussion begins to appear - and spread rapidly - online, quickly dwarfing other book communities.By the present day, Harry Potter is by far the largest fandom with written and posted fanfictions on Fanfiction.net, numbering about ~787,000 works.Likewise, “BNFs”, or Big-Name Fans, begin to appear in the Harry Potter online fan community, and greatly influence many fans’ views with their postings.Some of these “BNFs”, particularly for the most popular Harry Potter fan websites, become publicly seen as the primary spokespeople for the online fan community, despite most being teenagers. They are also given opportunities to host exclusive interviews with J.K. Rowling herself, so long as they “supported Rowling’s views and vision”.The “BNFs” include names like Cassandra Claire, who posted The Draco Trilogy series of massively popular Harry Potter fanfictions, and now known today as Cassandra Clare, author of The Mortal Instruments books; Melissa Anelli, the founder of the Leaky Cauldron Harry Potter fan website; Emerson Spartz, the founder of MuggleNet; and others.However, J.K. Rowling did not seem particularly fond of the Internet herself, or online communities. In fact, the concept of the Internet itself “scared” her.From a 2003 “Behind the Scenes” interview with Steve Kloves for the Chamber of Secrets film with Rowling:“But I think I wrote that, those are the sort of details that I write because, that would scare me. I read all the time and to have to just open something and have it shriek at me. And one thing that I thought that was well done in the film, ‘Chamber of Secrets’, was the diary.Now, the diary to me is a very scary object, a really, really frightening object. This manipulative little book, the temptation particularly for a young girl to pour out her heart to a diary, which is never something I was prone to, but my sister was. The power of something that answers you back, and at the time, that I wrote that I'd never been in an Internet chat room.But I've since thought, “Well, it's very similar [to an Internet chat room].”Just typing your deepest thoughts into the ether and getting answers back, and you don't know who is answering you. And so that was always a very scary image to me, in the book, and I thought it worked very well in the film. You could understand when [Harry] started writing to see these things coming back to him, and the power of that, that secret friend in your pocket.”“My Immortal” Harry Potter fanfiction edit by DailyDot2004 - J.K. Rowling comes out publicly in support of Harry Potter fanfiction online, but only on “her terms”. As you might tell, to the then-young fan base at the time, this wouldn’t have been a problem. However, as the fan base “grew up”; more people (especially young people) came out as LGBTQA+ or different sexualities as it became more acceptable to do so publicly; and Internet use continued to spread globally, this did become an issue.To quote her agent:“J.K. Rowling's reaction is that she is very flattered by the fact there is such great interest in her Harry Potter series, and that people take the time to write their own stories. Her concern would be to make sure that it remains a non-commercial activity to ensure fans are not exploited, and it is not being published, in the strict sense of traditional print publishing.The [Harry Potter] books may be getting older, but they are still aimed at young children. If young children were to stumble on Harry Potter in a an x-rated, ‘adult content’ story, that would be a problem [for J.K. Rowling].”The rise of the Internet, especially as time went on, also continued to play an increasing role in the gap between Rowling’s views, and those of Harry Potter fans. As Internet use became more ingrained and a cornerstone in Western culture, so, too, did discussing Harry Potter by fans in online communities.According to one article:“[Fanfiction is] something that fan cultures have always been involved in. The arrival of [the Internet] means it has a greater visibility. Before the age of the Internet, it was only circulated between fans.”2005 - Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (book) is published. After going on a “research trip” to an orphanage prior to the book’s release, presumably to write a believable and realistic backstory for Tom Marvolo Riddle (Lord Voldemort)’s childhood spent in one, the appalling conditions of the institutions cause Rowling’s views to begin to change.Sometime between 2005 - 2007, Rowling would go on to change her previous view, and stance, of Voldemort as a “psychopath”, developing more sympathy and empathy for his character than she had previously. Furthermore, her horror at the reality of orphanages’ terrible conditions caused her to found her primary charity, LUMOS, dedicating to “abolishing” these institutions, and reuniting children with their families.This, I believe, marks the beginning of Rowling’s changing views on a story that she once promised to herself to “stick to her original outline on”. She had been writing the story for almost a decade (10 years) at this point.It would also mark when she first began to diverge from most fans’ popular views on the Harry Potter books and characters, the latter of which would, it seem, largely remain the same, even in the decade or so to come.2007 - Rowling publishes Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the books series’ final installment. Her making public her view of Dumbledore as gay after the book’s release was also seen as contentious, especially during, and after, a period in the United States where gay marriage, and LGBTQA+ rights, were a major issue (1990’s - 2000’s). Likewise, many younger Harry Potter fans were secretly “closeted” LGBTQA+, in a period of time where it was unacceptable to be open about being “different”.A lot of fans tend to forget that Rowling’s “Dumbledore is gay” reveal was 11 years ago, when the scene for LGBTQA+ rights, and how people viewed them, was much different than it is today. Popular perception of LGBTQA+ folk from the 1990’s, when Harry Potter is set, was still changing, and would for several years to come. Only 4 years earlier, in 2004 - mid-way through the publication of the Harry Potter books - the first legal same-sex marriage in the United States had taken place in Massachusetts.Likewise, as touched upon briefly further up, there was also controversy over whether or not LGBTQA+ - or “gay” - characters, or the topic of sexuality, should be addressed in regards to Harry Potter at all. Some considered it a subject “too adult” for “a children’s series” such as Harry Potter at the time; others pressed for LGBTQA+ representation in such a popular book series.However, even in the given climate at the time, Rowling’s announcement was met with plenty of controversy - and some because gay marriage was not yet legal in most of the United States, where a large portion of the Harry Potter books’ fan base lived. Likewise, there were some rumours of Warner Brothers, the makers of the Harry Potter films, quietly “silencing” their LGBTQA+ actors from the films, for the purpose of “preserving their public image”.Only later, well after gay marriage’s legalization in the 2010’s, and after other actions of hers, would Rowling’s decision be later seen by some fans, and criticized, in an entirely different light.While Rowling’s decision was lauded by LGBTQA+ activists at the time in 2007, as of 2018, some - especially those of Generation Z, born in the mid-1990s to early-2000s - are now claiming that “Rowling did not do enough for LGBTQA+ representation” in Harry Potter.2007 - 2012 - J.K. Rowling, her legal team, and Warner Bros. file, and win, multiple lawsuits against fans trying to publish “unofficial” Harry Potter books and encyclopedias, including popular Harry Potter fan website the Harry Potter Lexicon.This was, perhaps, the first inkling of more serious and widespread Harry Potter fan discontent and disagreement with Rowling, and the first time where Rowling took major legal action against “BNFs” in the online fan community who “stepped out of line”.From a 2008 article:The librarian at the heart of the Harry Potter copyright-infringement lawsuit stood up to J. K. Rowling on Tuesday in a Manhattan courtroom, and then broke down sobbing.The librarian, Steven Jan Vander Ark, had the mild-mannered demeanor of Ron Weasley, and the intelligence, charm — and haircut — of Harry Potter…Mr. Vander Ark testified that he was a former Star Trek fan, for whom reading the first Potter book, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, in 1998 was love at first sight.On the witness stand in Federal District Court, he portrayed the famous writer as his idol, his true literary love, who had been unaccountably bewitched by the evil, money-grubbing forces of publishing, like one of Voldemort’s vassals.One day, he testified, Ms. Rowling was singling out his Harry Potter Lexicon Web site, out of “hundreds of thousands” of Potter fan sites on the Web, for praise; the next, she was accusing him of plagiarism for wanting to turn it into a book.Did he consider himself part of the “Harry Potter community?” asked David Hammer, the lawyer for RDR Books, the small Michigan publishing company that wants to publish Mr. Vander Ark’s book.“I did,” Mr. Vander Ark said, his face reddening, as he turned away from Ms. Rowling, who was sitting 10 feet away at the plaintiff’s table, listening intently.Then he burst out crying. “Sorry,” he said, regaining his composure. “It’s been difficult because there’s been a lot of criticism, obviously, and that was never the intention.”It was an emotional culmination to three hours of testimony in which Mr. Vander Ark gushed over Ms. Rowling and her work like the devoted fan that he claimed to be, and disarmingly preceded almost every answer to a question with an “Um.”Ms. Rowling, who herself came close to tears on Monday while testifying about the Harry Potter books, and Warner Brothers Entertainment, the company that produces the Potter movies, have sued RDR, based in Muskegon, to stop publication of an encyclopedia of the Potter books by Mr. Vander Ark. Ms. Rowling contends in the lawsuit that his book copies material from her own books, while adding little or no new information and insight.Mr. Vander Ark said that he and his Web site staff members, including a teacher of Greek and Latin and two other librarians, had compiled the alphabetical lexicon as a “ready reference” for Potter fans, because the books had no index or glossary.Ms. Rowling reacted to Mr. Vander Ark’s testimony Tuesday through an e-mail message from a spokeswoman, saying, “A fan’s affectionate enthusiasm should not obscure acts of plagiarism.”Likewise, in 2009, J.K. Rowling did something previously thought to be “unprecedented” for her: she joined the social media site Twitter, seemingly going back on her previous, wary views of the Internet as “dangerous”.Perhaps it was due to efforts to combat online plagiarism; or, perhaps, it was done as a way to further transition, and grow, her presence and marketing as an author, and public figure, online.In either case, this would, as it turned out, further serve to prove that Rowling’s views towards the Harry Potter books and franchise as a whole were changing, as well as what she wanted for the direction of it in the future.2012 - J.K. Rowling opens Pottermore.com, presumably in lieu of publishing an “official” Harry Potter encyclopedia. The site, done with a contract between Rowling / Pottermore LTD and Sony, first opened as an online gaming site. It proves to be massively popular with the online Harry Potter fan community, rekindling widespread interest in the series and franchise.By now, the Internet has since grown to about ~2.5 billion users, or ~36% of the global population. Despite the movies and films being over (for now), with the last Harry Potter film having been released in 2011, Harry Potter is becoming bigger than ever as a franchise. It proves to be immensely popular in merchandise and toy sales, topping that of existing, popular franchises, such as Star Wars.Likewise, the first Harry Potter theme park, which opened at Universal Studios’ Islands of Adventure theme park in Orlando, Florida, in 2010, proves to be so massively popular and successful, that it breaks a 30-year monopoly by Disney on the Orlando industry. By 2014, the second wing of the park would open, resulting in even higher park visitation, revenue, and profits.However, the Pottermore site, while popularly received, suffered from numerous delays, bugs, and issues. This, in turn, would lead to…2014 - J.K. Rowling, interviewed by Emma Watson, announces that her view of the series has changed in the infamous “Wonderland interview”. After years of Rowling working with the most popular Harry Potter fan community websites to “promote her original views and vision” for the books, including particularly emphasizing support of the Ron/Hermione and Harry/Ginny romantic pairings……J.K. Rowling, in this interview, as per online fans’ views, completely backtracked on her previous actions. To many of them, she was admitting that her “views had changed” since 2006/2007, when she had originally written Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.In the interview, she stated (excerpt):“What I will say is that I wrote the Hermione/Ron relationship as a form of [personal] wish fulfillment. That’s how it was conceived, really. For reasons that have very little to do with literature and far more to do with me clinging to the plot as I first imagined it, Hermione with Ron…I know, I’m sorry, I can hear the rage and fury it might cause some fans, but if I’m absolutely honest, distance has given me perspective on that. It was a choice I made for very personal reasons, not for reasons of credibility. Am I breaking people’s hearts by saying this? I hope not.It was a young relationship. I think the attraction itself is plausible, but the combative side of it…I’m not sure you could have got over that in an adult relationship, there was too much fundamental incompatibility. I can’t believe we are saying all of this…this is Potter heresy!In some ways, Hermione and Harry are a better fit, and I’ll tell you something very strange. When I wrote Hallows, I felt this quite strongly when I had Hermione and Harry together in the tent! I hadn’t told [Steve] Kloves that and when he wrote the script he felt exactly the same thing at exactly the same point…and actually I liked that scene in the film, because it was articulating something I hadn’t said but I had felt. I really liked it and I thought that it was right. I think you do feel the ghost of what could have been in that scene.”Rowling’s own remarriage to doctor Neil Murray, whom she compared in another interview to “Harry Potter himself” (and herself, on multiple occasions, to Hermione), seemed to have changed her initial views somewhat on her decision to pair up Ron/Hermione and Harry/Ginny.Needless to say, for the main Harry Potter fan websites - namely, the Leaky Cauldron and MuggleNet - who had worked closely with Rowling for years in promoting Ron/Hermione and Harry/Ginny, as well as countless fans who had supported these romantic pairs, Rowling’s admission was seen highly controversial at best, and a “betrayal” at worst.This further caused negative backlash by angry and upset fans against the author, which leads us to…2015 - J.K. Rowling, abandoning the “online gaming” Pottermore format, relaunches Pottermore as an “online encyclopedia” (of-sorts). This move causes widespread negative reactions, and uproar, from Harry Potter fans and the online community, which begins a downward spiral of fans beginning to view Rowling more negatively.Likewise, Rowling’s company, Pottermore LTD, which was a team hired to manage the website in lieu of Rowling herself, further designed “articles” based on the format of popular website Buzzfeed.This included the creation of “clickbait” titles in order to gain more traffic, which many fans greatly disliked, not just because the articles were misleading - promising new information on Harry Potter lore, when, in reality, there was none - but also due to the poorly-written aspects and bad quality of many of the “articles”.Many fans also criticized the website’s poor search function and formatting, which made it difficult to navigate the site, and to locate specific articles. The website’s branding of “the digital heart of the wizarding world” also greatly rankled fans, who expected much more than what the site actually provided.But the worst was yet to come…2016 - J.K. Rowling, largely giving artistic license to Jack Thorne and John Tiffany, publishes the Harry Potter and the Cursed Child script.This one is fairly self-explanatory. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, which was later revealed to be largely “ghostwritten” for Rowling on the part of Thorne and Tiffany, received an enormous amount of backlash and negative criticism from Harry Potter fans and the online community.The main reason for fan backlash? Not only was the work widely regarded as “unfaithful”, and wildly inconsistent, with how most fans popularly viewed the original Harry Potter books - and for good reason - but it was later admitted by Thorne that he had based a large part of the story “off of his own personality and experiences”, practically imposing his own life over that of Harry Potter, the main character, in the play.To many fans, because J.K. Rowling chose not to solely write the script herself, and allowed Thorne and Tiffany to have what they saw as “too much creative control”, this served to further sour the once-rosy view that many fans held of Rowling.Likewise, Rowling herself, who had previously been documented by fans as liking “black Hermione” or “race-bent Hermione” art shared from Tumblr on her official Twitter account, agreed on the casting of a black actress, Noma Dumezweni, as Hermione Granger in the on-stage production of Cursed Child.Again, this decision - and Rowling’s later defense of it - proved to be extremely controversial amongst fans, many of whom “always saw Hermione as white”.To complicate matters even further, Rowling was also heavily criticized by a sub-section of Harry Potter fans on her portrayal of Native American and African wizards and witches in her “expanded lore” essays “A History of Magic in North America”, which were posted on Pottermore as promotion for Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.2018 - 20 Years Later - J.K. Rowling vs. the Fans - “Who ‘owns’ Harry Potter?”Given all of the above, it’s easy to see how, when, and why the Harry Potter fandom “began to turn” on J.K. Rowling.Based on what I’ve personally seen, in my experience with the online Harry Potter fan community, the most recent examples of Pottermore (“A History of Magic in North America”) and Harry Potter and the Cursed Child merely brought to light a dispute between Rowling and her fans that had been brewing for a long time.To quote longtime Harry Potter fan, and now author of YA works like Fangirl and Carry On!, among other books, Rainbow Rowell…“When I wrote Fangirl, I had to explain what fanfiction was to a lot of people, and I don’t have to explain that much [today]. That will continue because the Harry Potter generation is growing up. The Harry Potter generation is the generation where fanfiction really became a big deal. Even if you weren’t writing fanfiction yourself, you know it’s there, you’re just much more fluent in the internet.” (Source)Rowell herself got her start in the Harry Potter online fan community, writing non-canon fanfiction that paired Harry Potter with Draco Malfoy, one of Rowell’s preferred characters.However, J.K. Rowling has publicly written, and expressed her disapproval, of “Draco Malfoy fans” - and particularly, women who like Draco Malfoy - on Pottermore.“Draco [Malfoy] remains a person of dubious morality in the seven published [Harry Potter] books, and I have often had cause to remark on how unnerved I have been by the number of girls who fell for this particular fictional character (although I do not discount the appeal of Tom Felton, who plays Draco brilliantly in the films and, ironically, is about the nicest person you could meet). Draco has all the dark glamour of the anti-hero; girls are very apt to romanticise such people.All of this left me in the unenviable position of pouring cold, common sense on ardent readers’ daydreams, as I told them, rather severely, that Draco was not concealing a heart of gold under all that sneering and prejudice, and that no, he and Harry were not destined to end up best friends.” - J.K. Rowling (Source)Likewise, writer Victoria Lee, author of The Fever King, who also explored being LGBTQA+ and sexuality through writing “slash” (same-sex) pairings in Harry Potter fanfiction and fan roleplays, had this to say of growing up in the fandom in her 2019 article “Harry Potter and the Conspiracy of Queers: Discovering Myself in Fandom and Roleplay”.“The golden days of Harry Potter fandom is one of those phenomena you had to see to believe. Harry Potter obsession swept through the culture–everyone knew their Hogwarts House (mine is Ravenclaw, by the way). Everyone had a theory on whether Snape was good or bad. Everyone had a favorite possible ending.Harry Potter, to us, was possibility: maybe there really was magic hiding behind the mundane veneer of our real lives. Maybe one day we’d be able to leave our boring schools, turn our backs on the mean girls who bullied us, and escape into a world where we had extraordinary powers and would be taught how to use them.Perhaps Harry Potter was especially appealing to queer kids. In that world, we could imagine no one caring who you loved or what gender you were. People at Hogwarts would be way too busy drinking pumpkin juice and transforming chairs into birds to worry about being homophobic.We lived out these possible-lives online, through fandom. For me–in the roleplaying games, as well as in my fanfics–I had something like a brand. I only ever played queer people. Across the board, regardless of my characters’ genders, everyone was always very, very gay.Fandom in those days was rife with The Gay. Slash fanfiction—fic involving same-gender couples—wasn’t some niche interest, it was mainstream. And everyone that I personally knew who was writing slash at the time was queer.Slash was one of the first places I explored my fluid gender and sexual identities. I could write characters—importantly, I could write male characters—who shared my identities, who liked people of all genders, who were confident and proud in their sexualities.My mind exploded into this world and I created all these lives stitched into the fabric of Harry Potter’s setting and characters. I made Remus Lupin and Sirius Black shamelessly queer. I had Gellert Grindelwald say I prefer men in eighteen ninety-fuckin’-nine, and what of it? My characters weren’t hiding their identities.I had memorized the stretch of forty-one lines in Order of the Phoenix during which Remus Lupin’s eyes remained “fixed on Sirius”–proof positive of their love. I had underlined (twice) the part where Dumbledore told Harry, “You cannot imagine how his ideas caught me, Harry, inflamed me. […] Grindelwald and I, the glorious young leaders of the revolution.”As far as I and about a gazillion other people were concerned, this was Rowling whispering through the pages, it’s true, they’re in love, they were just like you.But to a certain extent, there was a separation: those characters were just that—characters. They weren’t me. And as gratifying as it was to write fanfic about queer Draco Malfoy, the truth was…it hurt, in a way, to write dramatic and passionate romances for these characters when I’d never get to have that for myself.Or, not in the same way. I still saw my future the way a fourteen-year-old Southern girl is taught to see her future: go to college, meet your husband, marry young, have a house and two kids by twenty-eight. No dramatic and passionate romances for me.[…] I’d never heard [the term ‘bigender’] before. I went back online, to my slash-loving queer Harry Potter community, and floated that word on tumblr. And it turned out I wasn’t alone. Those same friends who wrote gay fanfic, who role played queerified HP characters online, had also discovered something about themselves in the process. Ginny and Luna made me realize I’m gay, someone said in my askbox. Someone else: Harry/Draco fic was the first time I got to feel like a man. Or, I don’t know what gender I am, but I know it’s not the one I was born with.A whole new set of terms presented themselves to me, buoyed into my inbox from the mouths of these queer slash fanatics: nonbinary, genderfluid, genderqueer.Would I have figured out I was bigender without Harry Potter? Definitely. But it might have taken me that much longer—or I might have wasted even more time worrying about whether my identity was real. As the Harry Potter kids informed me, no cis person spends this much time agonizing over their gender.Back in fandom days, we didn’t need anyone to tell us if the Harry Potter characters were gay or not. They just were.They were gay because we said so, they were gay and in love and they were going to have brilliant, happy lives. Harry Potter fandom took a set of books that were almost aggressively straight and cisgender and colored them in with rainbow ink. We wrote our own stories in new iterations over and over, each RPG character or one-shot fic one step closer to embracing our own queer identities. If these characters can be happy, so can I.Recently, JK Rowling has come forward to retroactively canonize some of these relationships: Albus Dumbledore was gay, she said first, but the relationship wasn’t physical. Only then she came back years later to say actually, the relationship was physical, and passionately so. As a teen reader, this kind of confirmation of queerness in Harry Potter would have made me unspeakably happy. I’d have seen it as validation of my identity from the author of my favorite book series.But as an adult queer, I have come to expect more from the media I consume. It’s not enough to say the characters were gay—I want to see them be gay on the page. I want true representation of the entire spectrum of queerness, written in ink. That’s the kind of representation queer fanfic writers created for ourselves in the heyday of Harry Potter fandom, and it’s the representation we’ve come to demand from the original source material.Queer readers deserve to see ourselves depicted in literature. Transformative works like fanfiction will always be an important and wonderful part of exploring a fandom—but one thing that might have helped my teenage self come to terms with their gender and sexual identities earlier isn’t more fanfic…it’s more queer characters depicted in canonical media, as casually as cisgender straight characters have been since forever.If I could give my fourteen-year-old self anything, it would be this: the gift of opening a book and discovering a character who identified as both male and female, who was both bisexual and bigender—and who was, above all, proud.”This, among other disputes with Rowling, is what helped motivate fans, Rainbow Rowell and Victoria Lee included, to turn their Harry Potter fan works into original works. Ones where they, and not Rowling, can write their own narratives.Namely, the primary dispute, in regards to the Harry Potter books themselves, is thus: “Who ‘owns’ the legacy of Harry Potter, as a franchise, and its future direction? J.K. Rowling, the original author who wrote the series, and continues to write content…or the Harry Potter fans, who support the franchise with their money?”From the timeline provided above, the process of divergence has been on years in the making, taking over a decade to come to an impasse between author and fans.With the original Harry Potter fans “growing up” and maturing, so, too, have they increasingly come to view Harry Potter not as a “children’s book series”, but as an “adult one”, too. Meanwhile, Rowling still largely sees the original Harry Potter books as “for children”, seeking to write more “adult” themes into the spin-off Fantastic Beasts film franchise.To revisit the “generational gap” as well, it’s clear that J.K. Rowling, who grew up in a more “conservative” time, has vastly different views of Harry Potter than Milennial fans do.The primary reason for this? Technology. Specifically, the rise of the Internet and social media in modern society. As opposed to the time Rowling grew up in, Milennial Harry Potter fans are now much greater in number and vocal ability, thanks to growing up using (and forming communities on) the Internet.To quote a 2015 source:The Internet seems to be a good leveler of digital use, at least within the US. While fewer than 60% of senior citizens (ages >65) are conversant with and use the Internet in 2014, the percentages are comparable for all other age groups; 92% for teens, 97% for young adults (18-29 years), 94% for the mid-lifers (30-49) and 88% for older adults (50-64).How the internet is used also varies among age groups. While teenagers and young adults under age 30 use the Internet to find information, socialize, play, shop and perhaps conduct business, older users visit government websites or seek financial information online. However this gap is narrowing, according to Pew Research, and activities such as emails and search engines being increasingly used by all age groups that are online.Social media is another area where there is an age difference. While the percentage of adults who use social media (72%) is not that different from the youngsters in it (81%), there is a difference in the type of social media applications that is favored. Youngsters (teens and young adults) seem more prevalent in social media applications such as Facebook and Twitter, while adults dominate Tumblr, Instagram and Pinterest.Adults are largely passive or semi-active users of social media, as seen in that adults typically add contacts only on request, while adolescents actively seek new friendships.Adolescents use the social media platform as a conversation space and an outlet for self-expression, aimed largely at building new relationships, while adults use social media to maintaining existing relationships. Adults have fewer contacts with a third of the adults in social media admitting to having family as their main contact group. Contrast this with the fact that only 10 and 15% of adolescents reported to have family in their social media contact list.The type of material people post on social media sites differs as well. A surprising observation has been that teens post fewer photos on social media sites (like Instagram, for instance) than adults. Teens also post more selfies than adults, which is directly related to the fact that they click more selfies than adults. Teens also appear to post material that depict “mood/emotion” and “follow/like” topics, which are geared towards attracting more followers. Adults however, post under topics that included “arts/photos/design,” “locations,” “nature” and “social/people.”It is generally believed that young people are risky users of social network sites, because they apparently share more information about themselves than is safe and care little about their privacy. This contention is backed by countless examples of catastrophic outcomes of such exposures. However, the media frenzy around such incidents belies the real situation.Youngsters, especially teens, have been found to make better use of the privacy settings provided by social network sites compared to adults. This is probably because they tend to separate their offline identity from their online identity in order to manage their reputation.While the relationship between age and technology use is, if not always as expected, not really shocking, there is a growing disparity in the tech industry - the generators of technology.According to a survey by PayScale, the median age of workers at many of the most successful companies in the technology industry hovers well below 35.Older companies had a higher median age, and younger companies had medium age of 30 or younger. This is despite the fact that the people who heralded the IT revolution are now in their forties (40’s) and beyond. This disparity has been attributed to the change in technology tools and platform over the years.It can be argued that the comfort level that the younger generation has with technology is manifesting itself in them helping find newer ways to improve productivity and efficiency of our lives. What this bodes for the future of human-kind can only be speculated at this point, but it certainly portends to be an unprecedented chapter in the history of civilization.