Subbacultcha

July 26, 2007

Here's the joke, last week, as many of you might know, the new Harry Potter book leaked out onto the internet in a set of four PDF files where the copyright infringer took digital pictures of each page as he held it open with his hand. The files were on various web pages for about one half hour before they got taken down. After that, the only way to get them was using bittorrent (which isn't hard, but we can't do it easily from campus). But because we're all techno-geeks here, we read Digg all morning long and a fellow employee spotted it and alerted it. We managed to grab three of the files before they disappeared. One of us started reading it (despite the blurry text, he just guessed at some of the words). 20 minutes later, our supervisor comes in and says "Did you guys hear that Harry Potter got leaked?" We reply, "Yeah but we only got 3 of the 4 files." His quick response, "I got all of 'em. I'll pass them over." So 4 of the 6 employees here finished the story before the book was officially released. Since one of them had pre-ordered it as well, he let me borrow his copy on Monday and I finished it yesterday.
Fun stuff. I didn't think it could be done. I thought the author set herself up for doom with too much complexity and twists and surprises. It was done masterfully.
If it had been anything else, done in any other matter, I don't think anyone here would have cared, but it was pop-culture being violated by the underground. Just a less-dangerous way of fighting the man while becoming a little more cool for having read it around the time of the big craze (Give it a month or two and no one will be talking about it much, in fact you'll be uncool for having read it so late).
And thanks to Cristin for the tip on getting found by search engines. Supposed to add this link, and it should come up. We'll see Technorati Profile . We'll have to see if this works. By the way, I have the lassensurf@gmail.com or our usual twolassens@gmail.com account if you wanna drop a line. I haven't figured out how to add comments to this thing yet.