Sunday 22 July 2007

Harry Potter

The seventh and final book was a fabulous ending to the saga. As someone who has read every book as they came out, this time was no different. I stayed up all night, missed a friends birthday pub party and read the entire book. It was worth it.

What makes me a little sad is that so many people online are attacking people who put down the mouse, turned off the TV and read the book. It's a nice story. I read a lot of other books, newspapers, magazines and blogs, love watching TV and movies and have wasted a lot of my time online and out in the real world with real people.

Just be happy and nice.

1 comment:

David Keaveny said...

Just as bad are those who got hold of a copy somehow and then photographed every page, and then either posted them online, or hoiked them on to Ebay. How desperate must you be to spend money to get a series of screenshots when you could wait one or two days and get the real thing?

Deliberately telling people who haven't read it (and are wanting to) what the ending is is also rather pathetic. I have a similar problem when it comes to watching Formula 1 - Aussie coverage is pretty poor compared with ITV in the UK (at least the Oz race feed is from ITV, although we don't get much of a pre-race show). Anyway, I have to wait until about 24 hours after the race, then BitTorrent the full ITV show. That will typically take another 24 hours or so, because every so often I will have to give the router a good kick and my laptop a good kick to get more than 1 or 2 KB/s. The end result is that I have to seclude myself from as many forms of news as possible (difficult if you happen to work for Fairfax!) until I can watch the race. Getting back to the point, people who publish spoilers without giving big warnings before are definitely going to be up against the wall when the revolution comes.

The book itself was a right riveting read indeed; I gather UK hospitals reported a 50% drop in the number of child emergencies over the weekends when Harry Potter books came out, so hopefully there are many kids out there who have avoided bruises and broken bones this weekend.

Having said that, I also read that psychotherapists are expecting an upswing in business, due to either kids being upset about various major characters dying (and I ain't telling!), or publishers being upset about the money train finally coming to the end of the line.