Everything Ms Rowling’s been setting up since at least book two came to a head in this book. Death Eaters, Dementors, the return of Lord Voldemort, why Snape is trusted by Dumbledore, and more. She had me on the look out for red herrings and I STILL got surprised by the villain (outside of Voldemort). The level of tragedy she allows to befall the characters continues to grow as her presumed audience continued to grow in age. This raises the stakes on Harry Potter and his allies as they are even more likely to run into trouble.
This was also the most up front in dealing with teenage hormones. That’s not saying much – perhaps it’s risque by British standards, but I thought Harry and friends were still a bit on the innocent side given their age. Still, we do see Hermione blow up at the fact that she’s been carrying a torch for (view spoiler)[Ron (hide spoiler)] without much reciprocation.
I’m unsure of whether the remaining books can even return to the normal school goings on given what’s happening in the outside world now.
One thing that was referenced a lot without payoff in this book was Dumbledore’s legendary forgiveness. I’m not sure if it was implied this came from his time in the Death Eater trials. But a seemingly throwaway line has me wondering about his own past. All in due time, I guess. Just remember this is my first time through the novels and I’d prefer not to have a spoiler about that.
The other thread that seemed not to go anywhere was Hermione’s startup of SPEW to get more rights for the house elves. Perhaps there’ll be a payoff in future novel or perhaps it was just showing her growing as a person.
I’m a seasonal Team Fortress 2 player. Although I play it here and there at any time of year, I tend to really play a lot during October for the special Halloween missions. This year Valve was busy working on a new mode that was released earlier this week so they released a community-made Halloween mode: Invasion. It’s the first time I’ve spent any money since I spent $2.50 to get a bigger backpack a few years ago. Overall, the new modes were a lot of fun and I’m glad that Valve has gone from what should be the basic level of video game company support- supporting community mods- to allowing the best of the best to make money by sharing in the profits made during community events.
Cook, Serve, Delicious! (12 hours)
Here is a game that shows how interesting a video game can be in depicting work. Anyone who’s worked serving food to the public knows it’s a grueling job full of burns and ungrateful customers. Yet, here’s a game in which people gain enjoyment out of the stress of rush hour. My theory is that it’s fun because you can come and go as you please and your livelihood isn’t actually dependent upon it. (Similar to EuroTruck Simulator, Farming Simulator, and all those other European games) I also had one great Saturday session in which I was joined by someone claiming to be from Belgium. He or She helped me out with some tips on how to play and we had a fun conversation. I always love it when I have people join in on the chat.
Go! Go! Nippon! ~My First Trip to Japan~ (5 hours):
The first visual novel I played was Analog: A Hate Story, and readers of this blog will remember that I really liked the story and found it to be pretty emotional. I was hoping that this game would also touch me as other games and regular, written novels do. Instead there was clunky dialog that seemed most often to be written by the tourism board of Japan – containing lots of phrases that wouldn’t be used in normal conversation – like an old comic book. There were also pretty unnecessary anime-like nude-ish scenes. I’m no prude, but they seemed to serve no context, but to be anime-like. I’m more of a either make it count or don’t do it type of person. Like make some consequence of the scene. Or just go the other way and make it a rated R game. The tsundere and normal girl sister routine was also quite trope-y and didn’t add much. I did learn a bit and it’s probably still the closest I’ll get to visiting Japan, but it wasn’t my favorite game.
BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger (1 hour):
Speaking of anime, this was one heckuva anime-inspired fighting game. It’s not something I expected to want to play a ton of, so I made it the first game in my version of Dan Demos or Giant Bomb’s Quick Look. I don’t know if this is a new trend for fighting games, but it has much more of a story between matches than anything I remember from my youth. There are even choices to make in an RPG-like setting. I’m not opposed to checking this game out again, but it’ll probably be a bit before I play it as there are other games I really want to play right now.
Civ 5 (40 minutes):
Dan and Dave played a few more turns in our multiplayer games so I did likewise. Perhaps by next year at least one of them will be done.
Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (17 minutes):
Scarlett wanted to play a round of Sonic 3, so I fired it up.
I recently had to reinstall an OS on the wife’s Dell Inspiron 17. I was unable to complete an install for Fedora 22, but Fedora 21 and Fedora 23 beta were able to install. It would always freeze mid-install – usually around 70 or 80%. From what I could gleam on the net, it has to do with a kernel issue. But I’m not 100% sure. Anyway, just putting this out there for anyone trying to get Fedora 22 on a Dell Inspiron 17.
The wife told me she couldn’t print from her computer. Sure enough, I couldn’t print from mine either. I tried the trick from last time and ran
system-config-selinux
but selinux wasn’t responsible this time. So I removed the printer and this time I added it through the cups website: localhost:631. After doing that it worked.
I was watching Gold Diggers of ’49 the other day with my daughter as we made our way through old cartoon shorts. That’s how I grew up – on Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and the other WB shorts along with the Disney shorts. Sometimes, late at night, they’d show the black and white cartoons like this one, but I mostly found the black and white cartoons boring. They came from a time when animation was very experimental and new so people were impressed that these drawings could move around. There often isn’t much in the way of plot and the jokes are usually broad gags carried over from vaudeville.
Of course, something that carried over into the color cartoons way long than it should have was racist humor. The crazy thing is that I remember seeing blackface gags when I was a kid in the 80s. So it took a LONG time for people to realize it was not exactly a great thing. There’s also a crazy amount of asian racism in cartoons. The asian version of the blackface gag (you get sprayed with ink or something and now you’re black) is usually the cymbal gag – a cymbal falls on your head and now you have asian eyes and maybe even more stereotypes.
But it’s so rare to see a two-for-one racist joke like I saw in Gold Diggers of ’49.
What’s so weird is that our ancestors (culturally if your ancestors didn’t grow up here) actually found this amusing. My wife asked why the blackface gag is even funny and I couldn’t articulate a reason because it’s not. It’s just weird, even if you’re not considering the racist aspect of it. When I was a kid, I never understood. I just thought it was a thing – Wiley Coyote can walk off a cliff without consequences as long as he doesn’t look at the ground and any character that is hit with ink says “Mammy”. It was bizarre to me and, even as an adult that understands the history of blackface, it’s no less bizarre.
In my ideal home setup, I’d have computers in every room. I’m not horribly far off, but it’s mostly via old laptops and computers that I’ve retired from regular use or had donated from family members. As more of our movie purchases become BluRay (and with 4k video around the corner), some of those old computers just aren’t up to snuff when it comes to 720P and higher. I have a Roku 3 in the basement for running on the treadmill and that’s capable of handling higher quality video, but it’s not compatible with the way I’ve ripped my media. After a bit of investigation, it looked like Emby might be the right choice for me. So I installed it on the CentOS VM that runs my homeserver. The first thing I had to do to get it to work well was to change the Mono garbage collection.
The only real annoyance is that there’s so much overlap with Kodi. I mean, there doesn’t have to be: Emby can be the video source for Kodi. But, still, with how much overlap there is, it seems silly I have to have two programs instead of one. That said, Emby essentially ends up being more of a home Netflix than Kodi. It has a web page that allows the users to watch movies from the website. It also has apps for mobile and Roku.
When I set up my movies for Kodi, I split up the movie folders in a way that makes it easy for me to find movies if I have to browse the folders manually. This also potentially makes it easier for me to do some rudimentary splitting of the movies for my kids. That’s why you see all those folders across the top. When I go into the Disney movies section we can see the latest movies I’ve added there:
Emby – Disney Movies
The good thing here is that if I add in some new live action movies, it’s still easy to find the latest Disney movies for the kids. The bad thing is the way the database views movies. Here are the recommendations I get:
Emby – Recommendations
Yes, they’re cartoons, but they’re not Disney cartoons. The same thing with Genres:
Emby – Genres
Because unless something is horribly mislabled, I don’t have any adult movies in Disney. Although, something has to be mislabled, because I don’t have any – except maybe some Kevin Smith movies?
Here’s the menu (again, exactly the same as the website):
Emby Android – Main Menu
Android interface for watching a movie:
Emby Android – movie watching interface
So, with my CentOS VM with 1GB RAM and watching over Wifi on the phone, it worked out very well with a couple times where it paused for a second to load a little more. I’m not sure if that’s because of Wifi or because you’re supposed to have 2 GB minimum to transcode the video.
So far the only issue I’ve had is that when the metadata is wrong it’s not quite as easy to fix as in Kodi. It took me literally an hour to figure out how to get Emby to see Archer as the 2009 show, not the 1975 show. I would tell it, “no, it’s Archer 2009” and it would keep screwing up. Eventually I had to save it with all the database IDs removed and then get it to scrape the metadata once again.
So, for the time being it appears to be a great solution for Roku (and my phone – but WHY would I do that?). I haven’t tried any of the features that allow me to watch it out of the house since I have a very low upload speed right now on my current ISP plan.
After I wrote this, but before it posted to the blog, two things happened. One, a video that was 720P that my laptop couldn’t handle was able to be watched via the web interface as it just transcoded to a lower bitrate that the laptop could handle. (Another way it’s more Netflix-like than Kodi) Second, they released an email saying their new client may eventually be cross-platform. If so, it may end up ousting Kodi from my computers. Kodi is an awesome idea when you have one TV or multiple computers that can handle the different resolutions. But in a situation like mine with a hodgepodge of equipment, Emby may end up taking the top spot.
We went apple-picking just about midway into October, but this year only the Stayman apples had ripened by that time.
They had this creepy-looking building near the apples, so I decided to take a photo. While I was processing it, I couldn’t decide which look I liked best, so here are my favorites:
A while back I wrote about geotagging my photos when I was using Lightroom. I wanted to demonstrate how much easier it is with Digikam as everything’s built in and it works nicely and quickly.
Here’s how it can look as you click on each photo:
For the first time in something like 3 years I took my Sigma 120-400mm lens to the zoo. I had intended to get some Firefox (Red Panda) photos and videos, but they weren’t there. That was also a bummer for Scarlett as seeing the Red Pandas was the reason she’d asked us to take her to the zoo.
First off we saw one of the pandas:
Peeking OutEating
But what was a lot of fun was taking photos of the birds; birds that would have been quite hard for me to see in the wild. I think they came out pretty nicely considering the darkness in the bird house and the fact that I was hand-holding the lens. It seems like some of the higher ISO photos didn’t even have too much noise, so I’ll explore using it in the future to get the exposure a little more correct in camera. (if the photos look blurry when you click on them, give it a little time to load)
First a quick note for when this appears outside of Goodreads (on my blog, for example): This review will have SPOILERS and outside of Goodreads I don’t think the spoiler tag is going to work to shield you from the spoilers. You have been warned!
In my last review I (rhetorically) asked Ms Rowling to surprise me – to make Harry lose sometimes and perhaps have the kids not always succeed at saving the day. Ms Rowling gave me that and so much more. As I noted before, she delights in Red Herrings (these books being something like Teen Wizard Noir), so my attention was on high alert this time around. Looking back at my status updates I was right or almost right about the following (will be in a spoiler tag):
(view spoiler)[ -At 33% I predicted that Hermione’s cat was Black or worked for Black. The latter proved to be true and the former showed I was on the right track for the climax – the Animagi reveal. (I restated this around 68%)
-At 36% I thought Lupin might be a Vampire or Dr Jekyll/Mr Hyde type. This was due to the potion he had to drink. I was on the right path with the fact that he’s a werewolf, but completely missed the name clue – Lupin. I think I might have been more keen to that clue (lupus=dog in latin) had I not known of Lupin III and thought maybe Ms Rowling was an anime fan.
Yet, even though I’d somewhat guessed a lot of the reveals, I was wholly unprepared for the twist. (view spoiler)[The reveal that the rat was Peter and that HE was the real traitor! (hide spoiler)].
It’s also funny that the saying be careful what you wish for came to pass with Harry. I wanted a more realistic ending and, (view spoiler)[ He loses his chance to have his godfather as his guardian and also has no proof of his godfather’s innocence. (hide spoiler)].
This is one of the darkest books yet – the Dementors are pure nightmare fuel and the ending is pretty dark to match.
Of course, Rowling is quite aware of Chekov’s Gun (look it up on TV Tropes if you don’t know what that means) so Hermione’s method of attending class became a key part of the resolution of the climax. I was a lot quicker on the uptake than Harry and Ron that Hermione was clearly attending more than one class at the same time. I’m surprised that, as characters in a magical world they couldn’t figure that out, even if they didn’t know the mechanism by which it worked. That also caught me by surprise, but I was happy, having recently discussed (view spoiler)[the Time Traveler Paradoxes (hide spoiler)] with my wife that Ms Rowling is quite consistent and nothing about the narrative (view spoiler)[ we see the first time around before they time travel (hide spoiler)] needs to be retconned.
This appears to be the book in which Rowling begins the transition from middle grade book to young adult book. With the exception of a very subtle attraction between Harry and another girl betraying the fact that these kids are pretty unhorny for 13 year olds, the book definitely marks an uptick in the maturity of both the characters and the situations she puts them into. Again, once the full extent of the Dementor’s powers and methods are revealed, it’s pretty clear the Wizarding world is much more dangerous than we were led to believe in the first couple books where the evil was of a more cartoonish nature. In fact, if you consider what (view spoiler)[was supposed to happen to the Hippogriff (hide spoiler)] and how this book reveals that justice does not always prevail over at least two different occasions with life and death on the line, this book presents a very realistic view of how the world can be disappointing and not even the Great Dumbledore can magic people out of every situation. (view spoiler)[Except he kind of does with the Hermione reveal. Still, it was only by trickery and neither his powers nor his reputation that he is able to help them save the day (hide spoiler)]
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling
