HP5 #3

What irks me most is how pointless it turned out to be. All that damage, for a synopsis of books 1-4. Who is going to be Harry's anchor now? He has no family, no girlfriend. Not even the memory of his once-perfect parents. An angry, bitter, powerful kid who has lost too much and knows he has a very bloody future (BTW Determinism? What the hell? Don't our actions determine our fate?) - what will keep him going on the right path? Not Dumbledore, who has lost credulity. He needs the teenage Valentine Wiggin. Or GT.net's Ginny. Or... *shudder* Lori's Hermione (*writes "Mary Sue" on canon!Hermione's forehead with a permanent marker and AKs her out of her misery*).

HP5 #2

I was afraid of saying that, but seeing I am not alone: "Too bad Hermione spent most of the book being an annoying, overperfect authorial insertion who was never wrong about ANYTHING. God, I wanted to hit her with a log." ((c) Cassie) I think the Ginny info-dump was for future use in H/G, but bloody hell I didn't like it. Ron... I need to re-read the book. The Cho thing - well, I'm glad it is now canonically pre-OotP only.

HP5

Well, that was really bloated. And not much better than the good fics. Though the Orwellian bits were a nice gimmick. Off to work now, my team is mad at me for sacrificing a full night for the book.

The Eye of the Snake

"insensitive wart... emotional range of a teaspoon" Oh man... this is better than Dawson's Creek.

Amazon.co.uk's delivery estimation was overly cautious. Air shipping only took 3 days. Of course, I was already up to chapter 17 by the time my folks picked it up from the mail. I'm not done reading yet, though. Have discovered the joy of Instrumental Metal. Is very pleased with self. Alias is definitely good, although I think I prefer the Nikita formula ("buttkixing + tehnobabble + politics/intrigue") over "buttkixing + drama/romance + politics/intrigue". Alias is better suited to appeal to the female audience though, so I am not surprised of it being more successful. Not so good for shipping though, as much of the good stuff is already in canon. When done with it will go read RJA's stuff.

Thank God for the Internet.

LOL

A&Z finally got the poor lad laid. And it only took them 3.5 MB of filtered html. ;-) It feels as if an epoch has come to an end and nothing will ever be quite the same again. Oh well - we'll see what becomes of the fandom once everything cools off in a few weeks.

"Delivery estimate: July 1 - July 4" Wah.

1x02 was not bad. The guy who plays the dad is quite good. I don�t think it�s wise to hold plutonium in your bare hands. I don't like the evolution of Q. Yes, the techie gadget-developer is a geek, but he's supposed to at least be able to function in society. Birkoff was a good rendition. This SD6 ubernerd though... yick.

Watched Alias 1x01. Not bad.

I think I'll elaborate on good web site design patterns. Today's sites must be dynamic and use CSS and a database driven content management system. That way, when adding content (chapters or stories, or (gasp) authors) there is no need to create a directory tree and index html files and all that paraphernalia - one should be able to do all that automatically with a few mouse clicks and info pasted into form fields. The data would be automatically parsed to clean up the horrible Office generated formatting, linked to a single style sheet definition file and validated for cross-browser compatibility (something you don't get with Micro$oft tools). Then all entries would be fed to the database and stored there (possibly including even the large textual data itself, so it could be easily updated, searched, compressed, etc.). Cross-referenced indexes (by author, story, latest update, etc.) would be automatically generated, so as soon as the data was entered it would be updated everywhere (in neat formatting), making tiresome repetitive maintenance (prone to human-factor related bugs) obsolete. The system would also allow vital statistics be gathered (and displayed using flash-based graphics!) and email updated be sent, all without any human supervision. The administration's day to day task would be reduced by an order of magnitude. The data would be displayed based on templates and style sheet information. No changes would be necessary on the backend to alter: font, color, background, and layout of every page on site, instantaneously. All that is required for such a redesign is tweaking of a single CSS file, or, provided the content management system is "smart" enough - the same, but in WYSIWYG mode. If you've wondered - the file would also contain paths to the graphics, so that too is easily changed globally. Even better, using smart client side scripting and caching the monthly traffic could be reduced (by half) by re-rendering indexes on the client side and making the textual data much smaller by intelligently compacting the (x)html. The savings in traffic and labor could greatly surpass the costs generated by the overhead created by the extra features (web application API, keyword and parameter searches, statistics (popularity, updates, word count), per-user customizations (bookmarks, favorites, reading list, email notification...), rdf syndicating, etc.), though you have to take the increase in hosting cost into account. Speaking of costs - the one time starting investment could also be prohibitive - developing such a system will not be cheap, and it does require real enterprise level hosting solutions (web server, DB server..), so for a site that cannot be a dot-com - it's a real problem, especially because few of the management or regular users of a Harry Potter Fan Fiction devoted site would be able to do some of the technical work themselves... I sure wouldn't want to develop that on ASP and VBScript though! *Sigh* </nerd>

What's the matter with GT.net? Are the QoHG on administrative leave?

So AtE is a LOTR crossover. Figures.