Hari's Corner

Humour, comics, tech, law, software, reviews, essays, articles and HOWTOs intermingled with random philosophy now and then

Pottermania and other random ramblings

Filed under: Bits and Bytes by Hari
Posted on Sun, Jul 22, 2007 at 10:23 IST (last updated: Thu, Oct 30, 2008 @ 07:43 IST)

Anybody else incredibly annoyed with the frenzied Pottermania that has gripped the world? It's become very hard to ignore this phenomenon. I can understand why hardcore HP fans and kids dress up like their favourite characters and line up in droves outside bookstores for hours to get hold of a copy of Deathly Hallows (even if I cannot appreciate it), but when serious literary analysts and University professors debate whether it's better if Harry was killed off or not and respectable newspapers cover Harry Potter trivia instead of national news in the front page, I'm getting a bit scared. Wake up! We're talking about a fictional entity here, folks. And even If you do have to discuss HP, why can't it be at a more intellectual level? What about JKR's literary merits? Is the main selling point of Harry Potter the part where characters die or get killed? Is all that hype and marketing necessary to sell a good, wholesome story which everybody can read and enjoy? I myself have read and even reviewed Harry Potter books in the past, but never did I feel the urge to re-read any of them as I do with so many other authors' works. Beyond a thin layer of suspense and thrill, I find that there's nothing really original or uniquely compelling about JKR's writing.

In case you haven't got it: I'm not jumping up and down to find out if a figment of somebody's imagination in a work of fiction dies or not. :P

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Where have all my blogging friends gone? Many of the blogs that I've subscribed to seem to have slowly faded away with fewer and fewer posts in recent months. I know that real life has its own pressures, but I would appreciate an occasional update from people who have just disappeared off the internet without any explanation.

I'm not talking only about the blogs in my blogroll. It seems to be a general trend that web logs start losing steam over a period of time. Maybe the novelty of this technology is slowly fading away and people are starting to realize that it's much harder to stay motivated to keep updating if they really don't like to write. Fortunately, I love writing for its own sake as well. That's what has kept me going over a period of over two years.

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I'm doing a bit of guest writing over at Untwisted Vortex. RT recently invited readers to contribute to his blog while offering to do the same for other bloggers and I must say that it's an experiment I felt compelled to participate in. In case you're interested in reading my articles over there, I've linked to them in my articles page (which will be regularly updated). For my part, all I can say is that guest blogging has opened new avenues of thought which I can use to my benefit. Sometimes, writing about the same thing to the same audience can start getting stale. I derive immense satisfaction when I manage to keep my readers interested over a period of time.

13 comment(s)

  1. not sure about others, but I'm around...

    Comment by Shrinidhi Hande (visitor) on Sun, Jul 22, 2007 @ 16:52 IST #
  2. I'll give you a clue. The last 28 comments on this blog have been by you, Logesh and myself (edit: make that 29 now).

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Sun, Jul 22, 2007 @ 17:41 IST #
  3. right, better break that comment trend. I like writing, but I'm lazy. In fact, with many things in life, I'm lazy. :( It's something I need to work on.

    Comment by titanium (visitor) on Sun, Jul 22, 2007 @ 17:49 IST #
  4. Well, tg, I was actually following your posts and while you take long breaks, you always come back to blogging. Actually I'm talking about certain bloggers on my link list (no I won't point them out) who've disappeared for months on end now and it seems like those blogs have been abandoned, left to face the cruel world alone like orphans :razz:It's not the lack of comments on my own blog though. It's just the normal concern I have for people I've lost touch with now.

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Sun, Jul 22, 2007 @ 17:52 IST #
  5. As for Harry Potter, I think it's great that it gets kids to line up at bookstores to read a book or books, that's the only good thing. For some other unknown reason, I have had zero desire to watch, read or even talk about Harry Potter. My wife went to see the latest movie, she's rented them, etc.. The last time she watched one at home, I fell asleep within a matter of minutes. It's like American Football, when it's on, it makes me sleepy and I end up taking a nap.I went thru a little post frenzy myself at the beginning of the month as I had a lot to post about but it's kind of died down due to real life things currently.But I'm kind of like you, I have a dry spell then it seems I can go several days with a new post or multiple posts per day.

    Comment by drew (visitor) on Sun, Jul 22, 2007 @ 18:35 IST #
  6. Hmm... you're right. Inspiration comes in a flood and then dries up over a longer period.

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Sun, Jul 22, 2007 @ 21:06 IST #
  7. btb how many visitors you get per day on average? Your page rank is good, so you must be attracting enough visitors from search engine...

    Comment by Shrinidhi Hande (visitor) on Sun, Jul 22, 2007 @ 21:26 IST #
  8. I have no idea. I don't think Drew has any stats tracking software installed on the server and besides, I stopped caring about the numerical statistics a long time ago. Google hits are very low-quality traffic - a lot of hit-and-miss there so it's not very wise to draw conclusions from them.

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Sun, Jul 22, 2007 @ 22:10 IST #
  9. Don't forget about your feeds, Hari. You may have a lot more people reading your feeds than you have commenting.

    Comment by RT Cunningham (visitor) on Mon, Jul 23, 2007 @ 03:02 IST #
  10. Yeah, I don't have any stats tracking software as I never used or cared myself for my own sites. But I did take a quick look at the apache logs that started at 4:40AM this morning, looks like hari.literaryforums.org roughly had at least 75 unique visitors and overall for the literaryforums.org domain it's around 682 unique visitors. You get more traffic than any other domain I host except Alison, Ray's in third place. Mine don't even come close to the amount of traffic you guys draw.. :)

    Comment by drew (visitor) on Mon, Jul 23, 2007 @ 06:38 IST #
  11. RT, you may be right. But I don't publish full feeds. Just an article summary. I was always worried about the ease of splogging if I syndicated my whole content.Drew, you make me blush. :oops: Thanks for the information.

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Mon, Jul 23, 2007 @ 07:28 IST #
  12. [...] Reading Pottermania and other random ramblings Posted by ubuntucat Filed in [...]

    Comment by Am I the only one who hasn’t read Harry Potter? « UbuntuCat (visitor) on Mon, Jul 23, 2007 @ 22:23 IST #
  13. [...] briefly touched on the subject of blogs fading away in this post. Now I'm seriously considering removing some of the dead blogs from my link list. By dead, I mean [...]

    Comment by Hari’s Corner » Air crash investigations and other random jottings (visitor) on Mon, Aug 6, 2007 @ 22:23 IST #

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