PotterCast

...In other news, I've been listening to PotterCast, which has inspired me to delve back into the Harry Potter universe. I'm spiraling down, so my first pass is to read the Reader's Guides, a fan-annotated (and heavily hyperlinked) guide that sums up chapters in a format like SNPP episode capsules.

If there were some way to do it without causing copyright problems, I'd really love to see fan-annotated books. The best architecture I can think of would be a site that lists footnotes indexed by their appearance in the book, so that I could link the phrase "Gran, I've lost my toad again" (PS6) to speculation on who/what Neville's toad really is, someone else could link just the word "lost" to a list of things Neville has lost or forgotten, and someone else again could link "Gran" to a "Neville's Gran" filk of "Stacy's Mom" (not in that GILF way, if I had my druthers, just a song about her) -- without actually putting the entire books online, except in tiny snippets as indexes to notes. But I can't figure out how to actually make this usable. I can imagine turning on layers of commentary by username, tags, type of commentary, etc., but it turns into a mountain of metadata.

Then again, this has never bothered Talmud scholars.

I've got a real eye for design...

...but THIS design might have come from my glass eye. I'm not quite sure.

Now, granted, I like the TBLC logo, and I like deconstructing it. But I'm not sure it's enough for an entire tie. Still, I'm sort of hoping TBLC decides they like it well enough to buy me one. :)

Zazzle is now selling neckties, among other new things, so those of you who like to make homemade gifts without the danger of getting macaroni glued to your fingers will be glad to know that it was pretty easy to do this. (I had to make two images, one with the TBLC logo and one with the wavy bits, and set the tie's background color to exactly the same hex value and the two images. Also, I had to remove lots of duplicates, since Zazzle expects you to want to tile your images.)

But, yeah... it was pretty easy, and I could fairly easily make more designs like this as a promo of some sort.