The Book of Ryan

Brian Lynch showed us that 30 Rock is a rip-off of the Muppets, but the Tina Fey comedy is not the only show with bizarre parallels to another. J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter novels and Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer, both released the same year, are eerily similar. The parallels cannot be intentional, but let me present the evidence and you can be the judge. What follows is a comparison of several major and minor characters in both the novels and the series describing the roles they play. Could so much similarity be coincidence?

Here’s a quick teaser for a new project I’m working on, almost ready for public beta. def loot(character_sheet_file) @xml ||= Hpricot::XML(character_sheet_file.read) @loot ||= @xml.search("//LootTally/loot[@count!='0']").map do |item| res = item.search("//RulesElement") case res.size when 0: nil when 1: coder.decode(res.first.attributes["name"]) when 2: coder.decode(res.last.attributes["name"].sub(res.first.attributes["type"], res.first.attributes["name"])) else res.map { |re| coder.decode(re.attributes["name"]) }.join(" ") end end.compact end Character files from D&DI [...]