Alas no glasses pictures yet

I have started reading Deathly Hallows, after cthulhia read the same copy in less than 24 hours. It is the third thing down in a stack of SF I am in the middle of reading (within PKD's Eye in the Sky, given to me by Ricky, itself within Dogland, an American magical-realism story that R. Cory was breathless about on Boing Boing a couple weeks ago). So far I'm finding it as nice a confection as the last book, which I enjoyed a great deal just a couple of months ago.

Yesterday stumbled across dictator555's copy of "The End of Harry Potter?" an exegesis written by Dave Langford, one of the B-est BNFs in SF and the publisher of Ansible. While sold as speculation about the final book, it's actually a fun, breezy tour through how the merits and flaws of the first six books line up against the whole genre, and Langford's admiration for the series seems to lie less in the story itself and more in watching Rowling mature as a writer over its course. I might like to borrow it later.

(Also he spends a few pages at the start grumbling about mainstream critics' frequent insistence that the series transcends the fantasy genre because it's actually about real human issues and not just sweaty dudes stabbing giant lizards, and this echoes other grumbling I've read recently...)

Obl. new glasses photo.

Why yes.

( They look rather like the old ones. )

More reasons to love XKCD

* The ambiguity of this comic:

Slashdorks will read it and be like "rofl i deal with idiots like this at work every damn day, but they'd fire me if I hung up on them for real", even though I'm fairly confident that's not the joke. Something for everyone!

* The comic is hand-lettered. I have probably already mentioned this as a reason I like the comic, but I'll say it again. Hand-lettering makes any comic look about ten times better to me. (And you could make a "zero times ten" wisecrack here, but I would retort that there is a basic charm to the art. Very basic, sure, but still.)

* There are no comments or ratings or anything attached to the comic. Everyone likes getting comments, and I'd understand if he wanted to have comments so that every comic would have an ever-growing beard of public "LOL ^^;" messages attached, but I wouldn't like it.

* The cartoonist invites and even encourages direct linking to the cartoon images, even printing the necessary HTML code beside each one. That's great.