1920 The More You Know.

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I got distracted by stuff going on outside of my hermitage & forgot to set up the post. Not that it’s all that late, but still. I’ll post a little more after I’m done with my admin.

I know some of you are in to Harry Potter stuff and whatnot because you comment on the various references I make to it here and there. So I’m just going to assume you are aware of JK Rowling’s twitter, pottermore, and so on. I’m really starting to think that if she’s given enough time Harry Potter will suffer the same fate as Star Wars. She’s gonna retroactively change and add stuff until she ruins her little universe. The stuff with the fate of Hagrid is really skirting the edges of unacceptable. Midiclorian levels of unacceptable. I mean, it’s her universe to ruin as she sees fit, but it’s hard to watch as a fan. So far, on balance, she’s mostly enhanced her existing work, but this thing about one of the main females being cursed to slowly become a wolf is like C’MON.

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Talking about [telling people about a lot of things]-
Stephen King, the author, said something like:
” I used to talk a lot, when I was about 10. One of my uncles said to my Mom: “What’s the matter with that kid? I asked him how he was doing…and his WHOLE DAY fell out!”

I like the first panel.
I was thinking, “Whaa? what’s the green thing?”, and then I remembered, “OH yeah! That’s the ice cream dish.”

People will definitely feel like advising you, but the quality of advice will vary greatly. Trust me, I’m from Maine. Everyone feels like a fucking sage up here, but only a handful of them could ever hope to qualify as an authentic one.

Believe me, if you want to learn about something, then either self educate or find a nerd who you can trust with your life. You’ll never be steered wrong.

Kinda like the internet.Buckets of information. Shotglasses full trustworthy. You virtually have to research people’s agendas before having an idea about their advice. There’s a certain resonance to truth, but there’s no alarm klaxon for info that’s just slightly off-or completely wrong. And you can take that with a grain of salt-because you don’t know my agenda. (not surprising-not too clear on it myself.)

Man, I walked away from her ideas when she did the Cursed Child. Honestly, I’ve always felt like her world is more interesting than a lot of the things she ended up doing with it.

So exactly like star wars I guess… we need a Harry potter eu

I haven’t really paid much attention to Harry Potter at all after I finished the last book – back when it came out.

Nor I. Unfortunately for me, my wife works at Hot Topic and keeps buying Hufflepuff merch for her grandmother, so whenever I ask if we should coordinate gifts for the holidays I get a thousand Potter-related ideas volleyed at me and looked askance at when I have no interest in funding what Rowling is doing to the setting.

While I can’t speak for everything Cursed Child, as I haven’t read the whole thing, and while I didn’t care if a black actress played Hermoine, I hated how JK said “I never said what race she was.” when she did when she okayed the artwork on the books, which yes, she okayed.

I even recall her mentioning how the actors for the movies were great.

So, at that moment, I knew she was a liar and it felt she didn’t care about what she created but rather some political statement she thought she had to make. :p

That said, from what I have read on the Cursed Child, I like the idea that Harry’s son isn’t a great wizard. I like how he basically wanted to go to Slitheren because he met Malfoy’s son and wanted to hang.

I would’ve done without the time turner stuff however.

I think the cursed child is hot garbage & I don’t know what part about it’s terrible entirety is hers since it doesn’t read like her work. It reads like a terrible fan fiction. She seems desperate to illustrate her “wokeness” but rather than make a new work she’s trying to twist her likely singular success to that end. I could write an essay over the whole thing but I haven’t the time.

I don’t often comment, but I had to pop on here to clear up harry potter stuff. The Hagrid thing you’re talking about, if you saw something she tweeted about Hagrid not making any friends after the trio left, and dying and no one noticing…..yeah, that was a set of fake tweets made by a satire site. If you read through the whole set, there’s obvious things that would make absolutely no sense, like Hagrid binge watching Mad Men and using an insulin pump (obvious muggle stuff).

Not sure what the girl turning into a wolf thing is either, but yeah, I would take some of this stuff you’re apparently hearing about with a grain of salt.

Well that’s good to know, but also irritating as it came to me via a fan site that is usually in the ball about such things. Fake news has invaded my kid wizard stories!

Real fake-news, fake Real-news, real real-news, fake fake-news; we so badly need our dear Doctor-Professor Colbert, he is so needed in this — our time of voting.

Fortunately there are others who either use satire as he did or more esoteric prognosticators on things political that are found on backwater and non-prime stations or channels, etc etc.
In my corner of the world I have “The Agenda with Steve Paikin”, sometime eye-rolling but always interesting and informative.

As “Blue Milk Run” so aptly observed of George Lucas, “of course, God can just as easily destroy what he creates.” She, in this case.

Thankfully for me, I never cared all that much about Harry Potter. The first 3 books were quite charming, but it kind of lost me after that. Combination of too much plot and inducing high school flashbacks.

“Like a small business owner who you’re sharing ice cream with maybe?”

Rulette is giving good friend advice. All quite true, though self-educating is also good and important.

In Re Rowling: Some folks here are old enough to remember “jumping the shark” firsthand. I’m glad to hear in this case that it was a misattribution but it can happen with any successful franchise.As a teenager I read a series of martial arts assassin novels called “The Destroyer”. The first 50 were pretty entertaining but by the 100th book you could tell the authors were struggling to come up with new villains. If demand from fans of the story continues, at some point the shark will be jumped.

There are lessons to be learned from every corner – sadly the more appropriate ones are not paid much mind by those who make decisions at any level.

Dr Who – is one such that remakes itself on a continuing basis just as the main character does. No matter what one generation does to the franchise there is another that will take up the mantle and take it for a run. Some better then others.
Same can be said for the James Bond series of films as opposed to Matt Helm, Our Man Flint, Maxwell Smart or Inspector Clouseau.

Thanks for bringing up those other franchises. I watched an Our man Flint movie a couple of months ago. I hadn’t thought about Matt Helm in years. I’ve watched enough Who to be able to say Tom Baker and Matt Tennant are my favorite Doctors. The regeneration gimmick is a contributing factor the the longevity of the series. With each new regeneration of the Doctor you get a whole new character dynamic.I think that the latest version of James Bond probably saved the franchise. The bit where Bloefeld is his long lost adoptive brother is a stretch but at least they dialed back the special effects to a supporting role and let James go back to being an SOB who gets the job done. I’m not sure that you could bring back Our Man Flint without it looking like Austin Powers’ more sophisticated American cousin.I enjoyed Smart and Clouseau but anything now is just an imitation of the original even though Anne Hathaway made a pretty hot Agent 99.

I’m not really upset about Dr. Who as much, as they tried hard to stick to the canon, core stuff while progressing the story. Tom Baker has been sort of an advisor to the stories, and Moffett has never really pushed it too far.

Just one quirk though – David Tennant and Matt Smith. You sort of mixed Matt Smith and David Tennant, so it was hard to tell who you meant. I’m guessing Tennant (he’s the most popular and for a reason).

As the Honest Trailer says, Dr. Who was originally limited to 13 reincarnations (or incarnation I guess), and they have now crossed that line.

Which they broke in the radio series. The Doctor meets his 16th regeneration at one point, which causes a large temporal diffusion. So they already broke their own 13 regenerations-only restriction back in the early 90s.

If you like the [ Matt Helm ] novels, you might also like these series of novels:

1) The Executioner by Don Pendelton, (which started in 1969),

and

2) Casca : the Eternal Mercenary by Barry Sadler, (which started in 1979).
p.s.- The hero, Casca, gets his immortality, (fictionally, by having a (spell?) put on him), by Jesus Christ.
(This is a fictional Jesus Christ), who puts this spell on Casca, as a punishment, however-
I wanted to mention that these novels have a fictional Jesus, putting a fictional spell on someone- for those fiction readers- who don’t want Jesus Christ portrayed in fiction, like that.

I’m sad to hear about Rowling. It means she has probably come down with a case of what I call Gene Roddenberry’s Syndrome. It’s when systematic creator over-control becomes toxic to their creation. I named the Syndrome for Roddenberry’s behind-the-scenes manipulations of Star Trek TNG. George Lucas had/has the deepest most metastasized case known.

Times like this I want to start a “creation’s rights” campaign.

Perhaps I’ve been reading the wrong manga too much, but panel 1 perspective made me think odd thoughts. And with a cherry in the middle, huh?

However, and more importantly … don’t let Evrina give up too quickly. For instance, if you’re a snake, it doesn’t make sense to be told you have to bite someone now and then to let the poison out. Look Rulette, smoke another doobie and play some more D&D and Evrina will take care of herself, aight?

Don’t defang my Evrina! She’s already nice on the inside!

I think Rulette is specifically talking about how she hates working customer service but does it anyway. It’s not the fun snarky kind of hate but the “my job is killing me slowly” kind of hate.

It is pretty amazing how quickly George Lucas ruined Star Wars, considering the EU pumped out years of content, some aggressively mediocre, none as good as the first Zahn trilogy, without pissing off the fandom until Lucasfilm made RA Salvatore kill Chewbacca.

Which is funny, in a way. RA Salvatore wanted to kill off someone else, and then had to play the game of “Well how about x then?” for about four other characters until LucasArts said, “Oh, Chewbacca? The character that has the least amount of merchandising behind him? Sure.”

And that struck Salvatore as odd for a while, and he even suspected it would have bigger blowback than if they had let him kill off C3PO as he had planned (I think it was C3PO, but not sure).

I think part of the problem is that creators have unspoken STRICT ideas about their little universes that they try to stick to for the longest time, until money or popularity comes into play. George Lucas ruining Star Wars is a perfect example of that. He had very, very specific ideas about characters and plot threads that weren’t exactly thought out well. So his movies – which may have had better plots or stories if some rewriting was done – didn’t pan out because he stuck to his flawed ideas. And forced others to stick to them as well. The Extended Universe was always “unofficial” because it usually ran contrary to what Lucas had imagined for Star Wars. If it made money, he would deviate, because … well, money. That’s why he made so many merchandising decisions for his movies.

Rowlings may suffer from that as well. Her idea is these characters are basically nebulous (save their genders) because they were meant to be stories for her kids. When you agree to let them make movies of your stuff, you kinda have to agree to their casting. She gave her approval because maybe she had NO IDEA what Hermoine actually looked like in her books, but here’s this great young actress to play the part so YEAH SHE’S GREAT JUST LIKE THAT. So later, when it came to MONEY, hey Hermoine can be whoever they want it to be since she probably wasn’t sure to start with. But I know for a fact she hates it when someone tries to interpret what she was going for in a specific scene in her book. She’ll slam her foot down on something that doesn’t fit her perfect little world, even if it’s a very bad and terribly planned thing. Unless, you know, money.

But that’s a thing. I read all of the books, although I lost a lot of my enjoyment of them around the Order of the Phoenix. I liked the childhood wonderment and mystery of magic, but when they started becoming stories about teenagers having normie teenage problems, it lost a lot of its luster. In fact, when drama outpaced the magic, I was really just reading to find out what happened to everyone. A lot of people were upset at a lot of the deaths in the books, but I felt relieved since it meant less people talking and interacting, thus less teenage drama.

I know that the Cursed Child is bad, but wasn’t it a fanfic/screenplay amalgamation until J.K. Rowling made canon? Did I make that up? I’ve always been confused with the history of CC.

Ok, so I looked it up, and the story was written by 3 people, including Rowling, but the script was written by another dude.

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