Oh yes, another one of these....

Step 1: Put your music player on shuffle.
( cut for those who've had enough of this stuff... )

Added more lines for the songs that are still mysteries.

Thank you sparkymonster for telling me this first when the news was hot off the presses. Now, of course, it's 12 hours later almost exactly. I bibbled in IM rather than here, initially.

What? Oh, have you not heard? ( Hagrid never married. Whoops, I mean: Dumbledore is gay. )

Also: She was surprised that no one had ever asked her what Dumbledore’s wand was made of. If ever asked this question she would have simply said "It’s made of Elder" and left it at that. Well, yes. That's why I wouldn't have asked.... Oh, wait, she means before book 7 came out. When eight-year-old Mia asked an Aberforth question, Jo asked her age and said that just for her the answer would be "that the goats were easy to keep clean and that they had curly horns," as the audience roared with laughter. Really, the second (HPANA) link has all the stuff of greatest fannish interest, as you'd expect.
( Yet more quotes. )

I'm amused. As saylee said in IM, "It does confirm my theory that JKR does better gay subtext than straight romance." Ayep. The vibe from just that one description of the picture of the young Dumbledore and Grindelwald was quite clear, and, I must agree, more convincing than any of the overt, straight romantic relationships we were shown.

Yes, not the gay subtext many would have liked to have seen. It does cause a bit of a problem of double vision--confirming one gay identity puts the nail in the coffin of others that were not confirmed. But I have great faith that fanfic-writing fandom can not only only accept JKR's interviews when it wants to, but also accept them with one hand and ignore them with the other. Carry on!

I'm still in veiledintention, a post-book-6 game where we can always use Death Eaters or characters of Marauder age or older or just more players in general.

But now I'm in a post-book-7 game too, aww_rpg. Is there anyone on my friends list who cares about Harry Potter spoilers but hasn't read Deathly Hallows yet? Heck, I'll cut the post ( anyway. )

Time for the World Blogger Championship of Online Poker yet again. Proving I'm me:

and when she does, it's just a meme. I know, I suck.





Still, how cool is that?

Though really, the test ought to take the gender information it collects and differentiate between nerd kings and nerd queens.

... I have just illustrated my own nerdiness, not that it was in doubt.

There is one question I only knew the answer to because I looked it up after watching a friend take her test yesterday. But given that I did that out of geeky curiosity, I don't think it counts as cheating.

ravenna_c_tan and I sat down and wrote our last-minute guesses (in the hour before Deathly Hallows went on sale) on some plot points we expected would be addressed in the book. She posted hers here (and yes, the comments are spoilery). Here are mine. We sort of shorthanded the questions to each other so may not have answered exactly the same questions. ;-)

( questions )

( cut for the vast majority of my friends who don't care about Harry Potter fanfic )
Edited to add "Just Another Soldier in the War", which my imperfect filing system led me to lose.

Backdated, testing icons, nothing to see here.

please see wrog's ideas about book 7, so far superior to my own.

I'm sure some people's friends lists are afire with the news, but amazingly few people have said anything on my f-list and besides, I wanna talk about it!

So. Harry Potter book 7's publication date has been announced: July 21, 2007. A mere fortnight after the rumored 7/7/7, but this way it comes out more than a week after movie 5 rather than several days before. I assume the movie side of things is just being inflexible. Oh well.

(But ya see, 21/7/7 = 3x7/7/7, which is equally nifty in its own way. See the 3, and the three sevens? Okay, I'll put the prime factoring subprocess back in de box for now. Don't be scared.)

I don't want to quote J.K. Rowling about what will or won't happen in the book. Go ahead and do that in comments if you like--I just don't follow her interviews closely, nor do I care to. I just read the books. And the fic. And play the RPGs*. ;-)

And I just want to talk about what I want to see, and what I think I'll see.

( Want: )

( Predict: )

* Oh yeah, my RPG is still looking for a Bellatrix and other characters, though I know there are applications pending for some characters. Come play! Personally, I want to see more Death Eaters and more older characters, but the more the merrier! *bats eyes*

"Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows".

That's nicely evocative.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/6200745.stm

I saw another article that said it was Deathly Hollows, but I know which one is likeliest to be a misreading of the other. Anyway, you can go to J.K. Rowling's site and see for yourself.

EDIT: Deathly, not Deadly. Purely a typo on my part. *facepalm*

Everything below the cut is a query about how offensive some song lyrics are. Click or no, it's up to you.

( showtunes are evil )
EDIT: Want context? Check my initial comment.

A friend found this modern re-enactment of the third song on youtube. It's notable for being an actual family of men, and for a slavish devotion to the original blocking and camera angles. Also, Cheryl explained the story context for it better than I did.

... this leads me to hunt youtube versions of the other songs: It Depends on What You Pay, A Difficult Transition

... that is, if a Harry Potter LiveJournal roleplaying game sounds at all appealing. I'm Severus Snape. :)

I haven't really gotten rolling in an online RPG before. It's somewhere between collaborative fanfic and improvisational acting, and I'm enjoying it even more than I thought I might.

The setting is, about 2.5 years after the end of book 6. The golden trio defeated Voldemort; everyone but him and Narcissa Malfoy who was alive at the end of book 6 is still alive and available as a player character (yeah, I know, unrealistic, isn't it? but it's to allow as much participation as people want, so I excuse it); Lucius Malfoy is setting himself up as the new Dark Lord; Snape was exonerated. It's 1999 and Harry and his cohort are 19-ish.

The game started just over a month ago, and we've just hit a point where the plot is about to seriously start.

We very much need Death Eaters. Come be villainous! Our Bellatrix has been kidnapped by so-called Real Life, so we very much want a new Bella. But any new player is a good thing.

( blah blah blah )

Trading standards officers have ordered the Black Mountains Smokery in Powys, Wales to change the name of its Welsh Dragon sausages on the grounds that they are made with pork, not dragon meat.

Courtesy of the Language Log, one of my favorite LJ feeds. languagelog

... and other fanfic writers. And other pornographers. You know who you are, and you're probably not reading this. (Nobody take this personally. Every one of these I found in more than one place by more than one writer.)

I have conducted an... ahem... careful study of a broad swath of fanfic over the last several weeks, and here are some pairs of words I would like you to be sur