The Lair

Yes, more HP7. I can’t stay away from the soap opera, the claims, the counter-claims. The accusations, the cries of betrayal, the inconsistencies in dialogue and plot points touted as proof of a fake. It’s wonderful internet history.

Yes, there may be spoilers. Usual warning applies - I try to keep the references vague and only link to spoilers instead of mentioning them in text.

It seems that the stalwart its_a_fake community is waking up and smelling the bitter, acrid tang of reality viz “ohcrapohcrap it might be real”. I find the bitterness a tad amusing - but then again, I was reading Robert Jordan long before Harry Potter existed so I know all about authors who screw up and introduce more characters than they know what to do with. Also, I’m a drama vulture and this rending of clothes and gnashing of teeth is utterly hilarious. The fans who’ve read the “leaked” copy are almost universally aghast at this seeming disaster, for what its worth

All I can say is - if someone (Bloomsbury) hired fanfic writers to stitch together a complete, fake HP7 and then leaked it in this low tech method, they deserve congratulations and applause for one of the best false flag operations in history. I think the chances are somewhat remote, myself - but hey, it could happen.

Even more to the point, I made reference to a brilliant trick in a previous comment - someone ran a filter over the awful photographs and made them infinitely more readable. That probably spared my eyes a tad. I’m so impressed with the trick that I’m reproducing a sample here. Yes, it’s a spoiler of sorts.

The original

The filtered version

It may not look more readable to have dingy grey on a black background, but read several hundred of those pages and your eyes hurt significantly less. Or it just might be that my eyes gave up and stopped complaining after the first hundred or so pages in that horrible blurry grey on white background.

And the official release date is today. But tomorrow or so, we’ll know if the leak is real or not. I say it’s quite likely real, but even better -