Matthew's Journal

I'm retiring the use of this software to run my journal and I've switched to Wordpress. The transition is still a work in progress, but, for the moment, you should use the URL millercommmatt.com/wordpress. Eventually, you'll just be able to use millercommamatt.com to view my journal, photos, and anything else I put up.

Spoiler Warning: This post will contain details about the contents of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. If you don't want to know anything about the book, I'd starting looking at another website right about now.

Late Saturday morning, I found myself sitting on my front porch, waiting with a very minimal amount of patience for my copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows to arrive. It was finally delivered at half past noon. After few breaks for food and the occasional phone call later, I finished the book at quarter to three in the morning. Since then, my wife and I have talked about the the various details of the book and the entire series now that it's complete. I've been thinking about how I really feel about the book. I'm now ready to share my thoughts about the book, to talk about what I did and did not like, and to discuss a little bit about how the last book fits into the series as a whole.

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I spent last week away on my honeymoon, so I'm a little late reporting this, but the Harry Potter publishers have released the cover artwork for the US deluxe edition. The cover will depict Harry, Hermione, and Ron riding on the back of a flying dragon. How cool is that. We can make some speculation about the location they are flying over and rather or not the dragon is one that we've seen before, but we don't have enough information to make any sort of conclusion. I'm just excited that I have something awesome like dragon riding to look forward to in the upcoming book.

US Deluxe Edition Cover for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (front and back)[cropped]

To the new deluxe edition cover in its full sized glory, please check out the following link: http://www.mugglenet.com/gallery/displayimage.php?album=2097&pos=0

Attention copyright holders: This is not my image and I make no claim of ownership. If you do not wish this image to be here, merely ask and I will be happy to comply.

I developed a cold over the weekend. I guess it started about Thursday when I had a sore throat. By Saturday around lunch time I started getting congested and by late that evening, my nose was running like a faucet. My head was fairly clear this morning, but now that I'm at school in my office, I'm back to being stuffy again. It sucks, but I've dealt with worse. Sometimes it just helps to whine a little bit.

My wedding to 2 weeks away. It's real close and I'm starting to worry about having all of the details wrapped up. I got the music for the service figured out last night, but who knows what I may have forgotten. I'm sure that between Christina, myself, and our parents, just about everything has been seen to. At this point, anything that we did forget about probably wouldn't been that big of a deal anyway. Nevertheless, with so many people handling different things, I just have to trust that it will all work out. Frankly, as long as everything is legal and I get to see Christina and all our family and friends smile at the end of the day, the ceremony could be beset by rabid wombats and I wouldn't care too much (Note to my fraternity brothers who read this: Don't get any cute ideas).

In other news, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is only 60 days from release. The Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix movie release is a even closer than that. I'm excited about both of those events. July is going to be a heavily Harry Potter centered month for me. I'm pretty sure I'm going to try and catch Order of the Phoenix on opening night and I'm going to lock myself in a room without external communication when I get my copy of Deathly Hallows. I'm going to be one excited and happy Harry Potter nerd.

To start the fourth thread of this entry, I'll report that my good friend Stephen's blog (buildingthepeace.blogspot.com) has been offline for almost a week now. Stephen is an engineer for the Navy attached to a provincial reconstruction team in Farah Province, Afghanistan. His job is to basically manage construction across Farah province. Many places in that part of the world have been damaged from decades of warfare or, for one reason or another, are unchanged from ancient times and require the building blocks of modern life. Stephen used his blog to chronicle his adventures in Afghanistan. The blog gave an easily accessible window through which friends and family could see what Stephen was up to on a day-to-day basis and it also served as a ground-level report of life and events in the region.

I don't know why Stephen's blog isn't online anymore. Google might just be having a very localized and very extended problem with their blogging service. However, I really doubt that. I think it's more likely he was pressured to take it down by his commanders or he was directly ordered to do so. It may also be the case that the Department of Defense (DoD) went directly to Google to have it removed. I know the military recently put in place several new rules concerning soldier's blogs, but I don't know how they may or may not have affected Stephen.

My problem with the whole situation is two-fold. First, I like to know what my friend is up to. I take comfort in knowing that he's safe, happy, and productive. Finally, Stephen's blog from Afghanistan was a very honest and usually positive overview of his mission. It not like anything he was writing was making bad press for the military. Stephen is a great writer and a gifted storyteller. If anything, the DoD should have used his blog as a positive example of the good things that came come from soldiers sharing their first hand experiences.

I've archived everything Stephen wrote and posted on his blog, including pictures and comments, since before it went offline. If he needs an alternate host, I'm willing to post all of his material here, on my personal website. I won't do it without his permission because it may get him in trouble and frankly, it's not my material to do with as I please. Who knows, you might be able to read about Stephen's adventures here one day.

Last night a received an e-mail that made me want to throw things. As a result of that e-mail, I now wish many terrible things to happen to the decision makers at Amazon.com. The e-mail basically said that unless I agreed to pay them more money for shipping, they would not guarantee that I would receive my copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows on release day.

A few weeks ago, I pre-ordered three copies of Deathly Hallows. I ordered two copies of the standard edition so that Christina and I won't have to fight over one copy of the book. I also ordered a deluxe edition to add to my extensive collection of Harry Potter books. My total order adds up to more than $75.

At Amazon.com, most orders over $25 qualify for free “super-saver” shipping. Last night's e-mail informed me that unless I chose to upgrade my shipping from free to standard (at additional cost), they would not guarantee that I would receive my copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows on release day.

I am really angry over this. I would try to better describe my anger, but it would probably require more four-letter-words than most people want to read. In the past, when I have pre-ordered Harry Potter books, I have never had to pay more for shipping just to get the book on the initially promised release day. I feel that this is just a greedy excuse from Amazon to extort more money from their customers. Now, I understand that they are making little to no money on the standard edition of the new Harry Potter books. In fact, with the free shipping deal they are probably looking at a loss. However, I know that they are making money off my deluxe edition. Furthermore, I feel that the fact that Amazon didn't disclose this information while I was making my pre-order amounts to little more than a bait-and-switch tactic. If they are worried about taking a financial hit over their own sales and marketing strategies, I think that's their problem and that they shouldn't try to make up their loss with veiled threats of late deliveries to this customers.

I'm just angry. My only source of solace in this situation is the fact that I live fairly close to an Amazon distribution center and I'm confident that I'll get my book on the release day even if I refuse to have more money extorted from my pockets. If Amazon was looking for a way to get me to hate them, then interfering with my Harry Potter obsession was a good choice.

Recently, a mugglenet.com poll asked readers a simple question asking about who would win in a conflict, muggles or wizards. When I first saw this question, my “knee jerk” response was that muggles would win. Based on my previous estimations of the size of the wizarding population, wizards would be outnumbered to the tune of 5000 to 1. Wizards, despite all their powers, would be very hard pressed to overcome such odds. There have been plenty of surprise victories in the history of warfare against overwhelming odds, but to win against such a margin would be unprecedented. Things would look even more grim for wizards once you consider modern military advances. I doubt a shield charm will fend off an atomic blast. However, when I first thought about this, I failed to consider that the fight might not be carried out like a conventional conflict with defined battle lines and the consolidation of territory.

The wizarding population is already embedded within the muggle population. Furthermore, so long as a wizard doesn't use magic in the presence of a muggle, there isn't a known way to differentiate a wizard from a muggle. If a conflict were to arise, there would be many initial casualties and many wizards would be eliminated early because they would fail to blend into muggle society. The wizards that would have a fighting chance (pardon the pun), would be the half-bloods and the muggle-born. Hiding in the muggle population they could avoid detection and cause chaos and havoc with their powers. I'm sure that we crafty muggles would eventually be able to devise a way to screen for wizards via blood or DNA, but a quick memory charm and some apparition would be able to save many a wizard from a tight spot.

A second facet that must be considered when thinking about this type of conflict is the role and fate of the very powerful wizards. A wizard like Voldemort has the power and resourcefulness to kill in mass and quickly escape and evade detection. I'm sure he could be brought down by weight of fire from a large group, but he would be a fool to fight a static battle against such odds as opposed to escaping in order to fight another day.

In the end, I think wizards would win in a conflict against muggles. As individuals, their powers allow them many effective means to kill, avoid detection, and escape capture. The muggles do not have the same abilities and their superior numbers are not effective against an enemy that they cannot find in order to kill. The muggles would be slowly killed off by a foe they cannot find or pin down in one location. Fear and suspicion would destroy morale. Any stranger on the street could be a wizard. At the very worst, we muggles, when driven to desperation, may be more inclined to destroy the surface of the planet in nuclear fire than to accept total defeat. In that situation, no one wins.

Thus, in answer to the mugglenet.com poll, I choose wizards.

I would like to thank Scholastic, the US Harry Potter publishers, for making the book cover for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallow avaliable in high resolution. It makes an awesome wall paper for my dual monitor computer. I have Harry on one monitor and Voldemort on my other. I can pretend my monitors are in an epic struggle for the fate of the wizarding world.

23 July, 2007: I've noticed that this post has been getting a lot of traffic. Most of you who read this are probably looking for a Deathly Hallows themed wallpaper. While I won't post mine for download for bandwidth and copyright reasons, I will give detailed instructions on how I made mine.

I took the high-resolution cover art image from Scholastic. Since the image was close to the combined aspect ratio of my dual monitor setup, I merely used Photoshop to resize the image to 3200x1200. Then I just set the resized cover image to span both monitors. That's all there is to it.

Today, Scholastic and Bloomsbury released the covers for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. These new covers continue in the recent tradition of yielding a very small amount of information for fans to ponder while they await the release of the seventh and final book of the Harry Potter series. Nevertheless, the covers do give us a glimpse of what will happen in Deathly Hallows and we are able to make a few inferences.

I'll start my analysis with the US cover. The cover shows Harry and Voldemort facing each other in some sort of arena. The cover is framed by curtains which is typical of the style for the American covers. I do not believe the curtains relate to a plot point in the upcoming book. I think that they are there to literally frame the cover image. There are human-shaped outlines in the background which suggests an audience. They may be spectators or they may be Death Eaters. We can't tell. Harry appears to be wearing a necklace which I believe is Slytherin's Locket which doubles as one of Voldemort's Horcruxes. I base this guess mainly on the fact that Slytherin's Locket is the subject of the cover of the UK adult version of Deathly Hallows and that it has already been mentioned heavily in the series thus far. I have not included a picture of that cover in this post. On the cover, Harry is looking upwards with his arms outstretched. It looks as if he's reaching for something or that he's waiting for a summoned object to arrive. Voldemort also has an outstretched arm, but it is unclear to me if he is acting in competition or opposition to Harry's gesture. He could be reaching for the same thing as Harry or he could be trying to prevent Harry from obtaining whatever he's reaching or waiting for. Voldemort's eyes seem to be split between Harry and whatever Harry has his attention on. I think Voldemort's face shows worry and/or fear. In the foreground, there is some sort of debris which suggests there there was either a battle or that the scene is taking place on a ruin. Given the audience and the arena or aqueduct like structure in the background, I think it would be reasonable to suggest that the scene depicts the final battle between Harry and Voldemort on the Hogwarts grounds. This battle could also occur and the Ministry for Magic or at another location that we can't recognize and that he's been seen yet in the series.

Now let us turn our attention to the UK cover. In the past, the UK artist has need be able to personally read the book before release. Instead, they are merely given a scene description from which to base there are. For that reason, the details of the cover art are normally not as significant as the US art. The UK cover depicts our favorite trio and a big pile of gold, jewels, and artifacts. To me, the portal in the background suggest something like a vault at Gringotts Wizarding Bank. There is obviously signs of conflict. Ron's face shows fear and surprise as does Hermione's. Harry appears more determined than the other and looks as if he's struggling towards a goal and reaching for something. I think that they are trying to obtain something from a Gringotts's vault. I don't know if they are in a fight or if they have run afoul of some Gringotts's security measures. If they are in a fight, the could be fighting anyone. All three members of the trio look a little battered sporting torn clothes and some light injuries. An interesting thing to me in this cover is that it appears that a house elf standing behiond Harry is wielding the Sword of Griffindor. The house-elf has his hand on Harry's sholder and appears to be either hiding behind harry or holding on to keep up. The house-elf could either be Dobby or Kreacher, but I'm betting on Dobby. I have no idea what the significance of the presence of the elf or the sword. As for the elf, I'm willing to bet that Dobby is present because Harry has gathered everyone he trusts most to aid him in his quest. As for the sword, its purpose is unknown, but many fans have suspected that it would be seen again before the series concluded.

I wish we could infer more about the upcoming plot from these covers, but without more information and the ability to place the images in their proper context, we'll just have to wait to read the books. I, for one, can't wait.

US Cover for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (front and back)

UK Cover for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

To see all the covers in their full sized glory, please check out the following link: http://www.the-leaky-cauldron.org/gallery/dh

Attention copyright holders: This is not my image and I make no claim of ownership. If you do not wish this image to be here, merely ask and I will be happy to comply.