Tuesday October 23, 2007

On a completely different subject...

And in other news: Rowling Says Dumbledore Is Gay.

Can't say I didn't see this coming.

Bracing for fandom explosion in 3... 2... 1...

Thursday July 26, 2007

Gayer than a tree full of monkeys on nitrous oxide

I was searching for the exact phrasing of the quote from "Good Omens" referenced in the entry title (since my copy of the book is still in Italy, as I keep forgetting about it when I go visit my parents / when my parents come visit me / when my parents send me things, and I invariably remember about it a few days later):

Many people, meeting Aziraphale for the first time, formed three impressions: that he was English, that he was intelligent, and that he was gayer than a tree full of monkeys on nitrous oxide.
From that, I went on to find the other quote that's always stuck in my memory from the same book, which is the "Buggre Alle This Bible" sequence:
Buggre Alle this for a Larke. I amme sick to mye Hart of typefettinge. Master Biltonn if no Gentelmann, and Master Scagges noe more than a tighte fisted Southwarke Knobbefticke. I telle you, onne a daye laike thif Ennywone withe half an oz. of Sense shoulde bee oute in the Sunneshain, ane nott Stucke here alle the liuelong daie in thif mowldey olde By-Our-Lady Workfhoppe. @ *"AE@;!*
(The whole sequence can be found here.)

Poking at Wikipedia's entries for Aziraphale and Crowley also led me to a pretty amusing list of their New Year's resolutions (Crowley commenting on the act of googling oneself is absolutely priceless, as is Aziraphale resolving to find out what an "internet" is), as well as to a list of Bible errata ("Thou shalt commit adultery" is probably my favourite out of them).

The things one finds while googling :)

Tuesday July 24, 2007

Uh...

"I did not like the book so I shall set it on FIIIIIIIIIRE~~~~!!!!1111oneone"

What the hell, fandom?

Saturday July 21, 2007

So about that Harry Potter book...

Word of warning before I begin: spoilers for "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" abound throughout this post. I'll hide them in the extended entry, so nobody (assuming anybody is actually reading this already, which is a big assumption :P) can get accidentally spoiled - just don't click through to the full entry unless you've read the book or don't care about spoilers.

This also gets really rambly towards the end. I tried to keep it coherent, but there's just too much that annoys me, and I've had way too little sleep last night, for me to fully succeed.

That said...

I don't really know how to put in words what I think of the book now that I've read it. "It was a huge disappointment" doesn't really feel right, because you have to have high expectations of something to be disappointed by it, and I knew it was quite unlikely that J.K. Rowling would manage to rescue her writing and plotting abilities from the downward plunge they've been doing for a while now. "Not worth the hype" is probably a better way to describe how I feel: for being the end of the Harry Potter series, this book, although decent in its own merit, falls flat in several respects. Hell, it almost reads like fanfiction in some parts.

One of the things I dislike the most, overall, is that after I turned the last page I was pretty much left thinking "...so?" - that through the 607 pages of this book, J.K. Rowling hadn't even managed to do what should be the chief aim of any fiction author: to make the reader care about the characters and what happens to them.

Continue reading "So about that Harry Potter book..."