Birthdays, back to school, networks & comments

There was a localized outage yesterday for my cable modem and when it went back on for everyone else, it stayed off for me. So no internet via desktop for me until Monday afternoon which means:
Sam, please send chapter in text form
Nifflers, please be patient with us
HPWiki project, I'm unable to wiki til tuesday
People I owe comments to, it'll likely be Tuesday

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At least the sidekick is working.

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Yesterday we had a swim birthday party for Harry, complete with diving for pirate treasure, a pirate cake and Jon jumping into the pool without water wings, which resulted in Aaron jumping into the pool, fully clothed, to rescue him. Jon can swim well with his wings, and moderately when he goes in via the steps but if he jups far from the wall he has nothing to grab to. So aaron rescued him, but it was terrifying-after-the-fact. Bubble suit is now mandatory at the pool, period.

The pool was the perfect end-of-summer activity. And yes, I do mean end of summer. Is it only schools in Florida that open this week? Even the Gap's back to school sales down start until Monday and our local Targets were still putting the supply displays out this past Wednesday. Dave Barry wrote a wonderful piece for the Herald (herald.com) last week, which I can't link to because of the desktop issue, but which is worth searching out, because he explains our feelings about school starting on August 8, to paraphrase, "WTF"?

So we're all set with school supplies, uniforms, heely sneakers for walking and rolling, and lunchables. And it's bloody august.

Hey, at least they can wear shorts.

Re the rewrite of HBP

Have heard of it. Haven't seen it because of previously mentioned downtime & birthday party offline-ness.

I can't criticize it too much as a concept, because I did something similar with OotP - I wrote - and posted here about 18 months ago - an edit of the Veil scene, with Hagrid falling through instead of Sirius. I certainly like it more than what actually happened in the book, although I'm willing to allow that JKR did what she did for plot reasons, grrrr.

I can criticize the execution of it. As I said elsewhere it would've been much more clever to try and do edits in the same 'space' as is in the books as they currently are, then PDF it so people could print it on sticker paper and paste it into their own books - there's no laws that restrict what people do "analogly" with their own copies of books. Then only the nexessary paragraphs would've been posted, and it could possibly be argued that it was a parody of the concept of shipping and of JKR's own after-the-fact changes to her books (changing Flint's year and the wand order issue from GoF).

I've seen that people have called it plagiarism and it's not, though, as the person who posted it said it was JKR's work. It's copyright infringement, in the same way that sharing text files or scans of the book is infringement but it isn't plagiarism. Plagiarism only exists where one claims originality in something one didn't write, and while I didn't see the files myself I understand it said it was written by JKr and edited by... Well, by someone else. That's not plagiarism, per the dictionary definition of the word.