Who is the Half-Blood Prince?

My dad and I went to see "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" last night--as far as we could work out, it was the exact same theatre in which we saw "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" lo these many years ago, which seemed fitting on multiple levels. "HBP" has to be the best Potter movie since "Prisoner of Azkaban" and is one of the two best movies overall, hands down.

( Actually sir, after all these years I just sort of go with it. )

All that being said, though, I'd still totally rather have an eighth Potter book than a Potter encyclopedia. Are you listening, JKR?

Clockwork Phoenix the first: some thoughts

First off, I'm going to Otakon this weekend! You'll catch me at my friend Alex Leavitt's panels, among other places. It's been four years since I've been to Otakon, and it's the first time I've gone as someone whose primary contextual definition is no longer "anime fan," so it will be interesting.

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As promised, I picked up the first Clockwork Phoenix just as soon as I finished the second, and all in all I was not disappointed with this collection either, though I do think that 2 is stronger.

Though the collection leads off with another lovely story by Cat Valente (yuki_onna), I don't think "The City of Blind Delight" is actually one of the anthology's standouts. Similarly, while I'm not sure I could sum up any common theme among the stories in Clockwork Phoenix 2, I do think that a majority of the stories in this first book are concerned in some way with the ties that bind, to indulge a hackneyed phrase--not that these bonds are primarily familial; hatred and enmity bind just as well as blood, or better, as many of these stories prove. Maybe if CP2 has a theme, it's just the rich variety of the stories within it, of the diversity of strangeness itself, which maybe in CP2 is emblematized by Ian McHugh's "Angel Dust."

( phoenix in flames )