sylvar

Reblogging from hmrpotter: a fanvid that uses the Discovery Channel's "Boom de Yada" song (parodied elsewhere already) and footage from Harry Potter movies. It put a grin on my face.

This Indonesian/English post about Harry Potter fascinates me. Just watching the languages switch back and forth, trying to guess meanings, etc.

Woot! The site design is almost nonexistent, but it works for me.

Yesterday I hadn't even thought of the site, other than "hmm, I wish it existed". Now, depending on how well the DNS records have propagated out, it's real.

http://accio.info/ : the fastest way to get official and unofficial information about the Harry Potter universe. (And you can narrow your search to official sources only, or look for fanfiction, or consult organized references like the Reader's Guide and the Harry Potter Lexicon.)

...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.

Someone should really make an icon of Hagrid with the text "Shoulda friends-locked that..."

Harry Potter Meme of All Memes by Osaku
Name/Username
Age
Gender
House	Ravenclaw
Wand	Birch, 9", Veela Hair
Best Course	Ancient Runes
Worst Course	Divination
Pet	Spectacled Owl
Patronus	Lion
Quidditch Job	Chaser
Wizard Candy	Sugar Quills
Profession After School	Barkeep at the Leaky Cauldron
Quiz created with MemeGen!

Yup, that makes sense. I was good at Latin, so I should be good at Ancient Runes. And Divination is a load of rubbish anyway, I always said so.

I saw most of King Ralph last night, despite the fact that the opening credits are done in Zapf Chancery. (I very nearly abandoned it for that reason alone, but I'm biased; my high school newspaper used Zapf Chancery for its masthead, so I'm a bit sick of it.)

I enjoyed it, actually -- and three actors in it would go on, ten years later, to work together in the Harry Potter movies. The actors
who play Vernon Dursley and Mr. Ollivander play a lord and a high-level official in King Ralph, and another lord is portrayed by the man who later provided the voice for the Sorting Hat.

Watching Vernon Dursley smile graciously (and therefore in a most un-Dursleyish manner) disturbs me a bit.

Ben-Bob says check it out.