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 series¹ describing the roles they play. Could so much similarity be coincidence?

The Protagonist

Buffy Summers

Harry Potter

The protagonist is intense and driven. Gifted with powers far beyond those of his compatriots, The Protagonist is attractive and a natural but unwilling leader. She quickly finds herself isolated by the stress of her position, which leads to aggression and anger even against friends and allies. The protagonist has little respect rules and authority, and as such is constantly in trouble with The Authority Figure. Due to the supernatural nature of The Protagonist, he is the only thing that shields the world from evil, and she is continually tasked with covertly saving the day from ever-more-powerful enemies.

The Brainy Best Friend

Willow Rosenberg

Hermione Granger

Pretty, but bookish, the brainy best friend is a whiz at everything, possessing smarts and a diligent study ethic. This excess of brains and resourcefulness is balanced by social awkwardness. Then intense curiosity and intellect leads her to dabble in more powerful magics than she aught. Ironically, she finds herself attracted to The Right-Hand Man.

The Right-Hand Man

Xander Harris

Ron Weasley

The Right Hand Man lacks the attractiveness and charisma of the Protagonist. He’s usually the comic relief of the bunch, and finds himself caught in awkward and embarrassing situations. Although he acts the coward, beneath lies a backbone that shows itself in the face of evil and adversity.

The Standoffish Mentor

Rupert Giles

Professor Dumbledore

Aloof and anachronistic, this knowledgeable older man is both an asset and a puzzle to the Protagonist. He usually goes by only his last name. He offers clues and knowledge, but saving the day is always left to The Protagonist. Behind his wire-rimmed glasses is a steely interior that belies his bad-boy youth.

The Fantasy

Angel

Sirius Black

The Fantasy is the man of the protagonist’s dreams. He represents the normalcy and perfection that the protagonist desires, but the reality of the Fantasy’s past prevents this dream from becoming real. The Fantasy is ragged on the edges, on the verge of unhinged, and is forcibly excised from The Protagonist’s life.

The Authority Figure

Principal Snyder

Professor Snape

While they’re both on the same side, The Protagonist and The Authority Figure are continually at odds. The Protagonist and his friends often interpret The Authority Figure’s motives as evil, when really they come from the character seeing the world in a different way, having different information, and protecting his own interests. The Authority Figure can’t stand The Protagonist, but reluctantly finds himself helping her when danger is imminent.

The Rebellious Werewolf

Daniel “Oz” Osbourne

Remus Lupin

This brilliant, quiet, scrawny male transforms into a feral vicious beast once a month, which his school friends help him hide, and restrain him from harming innocents. He lacks respect for authority, intentionally violating the rules. This character always finds himself playing second or third fiddle, where he is a competent but unexciting ally.

The Rival

Cordelia Chase

Draco Malfoy

Rich, attractive and self-centered, The Rival and The Protagonist continually find their paths crossing, despite the fact that there is no love lost between them. They constantly compete. The Rival feels extreme social pressure to be something he really isn’t cut out to be, often acting cruelly to those she finds weak or unattractive. Yet The Rival often finds himself laughed at by others during her moments of weakness.

The Mother Hen

Joyce Summers

Molly Weasley

The working-class Mother Hen is a frumpy and stressed-out worrywart who constantly fusses over The Protagonist. She always acts in the best interest of the kids, to the point of being a hindrance to them stopping evil forces. Although initially kept in the dark about the kids activities, when she comes face-to-face with what The Protagonist faces, she becomes a steely protector.

The Supernatural Schoolyard

Sunnydale High

Hogwarts School

Although a beautiful, welcoming place during the day, the setting is home to monsters and creatures of great power. Travel outside at night is quite dangerous. Despite this, the main characters are constantly sneaking around academic hallways late at night. The setting is a place of great power, which draws trouble to it. The melodramatic antics of high school provide a constantly shifting backdrop over which the child characters are constantly struggling with adult intrigue and danger.

1. At least as far as season three. That’s all that’s available free on Hulu. ↩

• It’s violent enough that I cringed. The movie is “patently too adult for … children 17 and under” and the fact that it’s not rated NC-17 is evidence of a moronic and/or corrupt MPAA.
• In all of 163 minutes, the only part of the whole flick I didn’t believe was a human able to walk in the open air of Antarctica in a peacoat and face sock.
• It had the finest, most tightly-controlled art direction I’ve seen in a film since Amelie.
• Multiply how great the art and story were, divide one by the result, and you get an approximation of crapitude of the music.
• It shows in excellent detail why powers like those of the motherfucking Flash are so dangerous.

In the previews: Terminator will be dumb. Star Trek looks like the story they wanted to tell all along and never had the technology. I’d want to see X-Men Origins: Wolverine even if Gambit wasn’t in it.

Once in office, the president becomes acutely aware he is temporary stew ard of a permanent position. … Every day brings the president that much closer to the time he will turn on the TV to see someone else’s face burned in effigy outside a foreign embassy.

The moment, as you can imagine, is bittersweet.

A burning a photo of Obama at an Iranian protest.

Well said.

Turns out it doesn’t work with AT&T’s EDGE service. GPRS and 3G were great, but EDGE was zero, zip, nothing. Not a big deal in Detroit, but in LA it was like trying to get service on the Moon. I toughed it out until after CES and MacWorld, but with Android and OpenMoko still a gleam in some Linux geek’s eye and the iPhone stuck with out 3G, GPS access or third-party apps, I figured now was a good time.

Meet the AT&T Tilt, a.k.a. the HTC TyTN II or Kaiser. It’s essentially the Oxford-educated younger brother of the Trinity. The same feature-set I mentioned above, combined with a slide-out keyboard and shamelessly good reception by comparison. This phone, however, is more than just a texting-friendly version: HTC has refined the details a bit as well. For example, the unit ships with a screen protector that fills the full screen width, and music applications don’t stop playing when the screen is turned off.

The tilt isn’t without its issues though. At almost seven grams it’s a beast in your pocket, and the slide-out-and-tilt mechanism feels ready to snap at any minute. The Tilt also stores your SIM card on the back edge of screen–visible when open–which makes SIM theft a very real danger.

Paperless Geocaching

The holy grail. Finally. With a flurry of supporting apps, you can view, manage, and track geocaches.

Learning about the cache

Locating the cache

Seeking the cache

Logging the cache

Add-ons

In addition to the phone, I also have an earbud-style wired headset which is both louder and more clear than the on-ear bluetooth headsets I’ve tried. I also picked up a car charger, as TomTom Navigator is a major battery hog. These accessories were all targeted to the Trinity, but since HTC uses a USB-compatible plug, they work fine in the Tilt as well.

The real victor was the 8GB MicroSD card. iPhone hard drive, eat your heart out.

Software & Mods

Windows Mobile is probably the largest cash sink I’ve encountered in a while. There tons of applications for it, but the good ones are rarely free or open-source. It’s $10 – $30 a pop for every little bit of functionality. A few I’ve found worthwhile:

GPS Tuner

A haus of a GPS application, it’s excellent for foot navigation (trails and geocaching), and can download Google Maps data in order to help you set your bearings. It’s not great for driving, though, as the maps don’t adjust in real time.

TomTom Navigator 6

I couldn’t have apartment hunted in L.A. over a single weekend without this app, nor could I have made it across the country without getting lost.

SPB Time

WinMo’s clock interface is terrible. Alarms difficult to create, time zones are hard to change, and the display is simply ugly. SPB Time has a full-screen analog clock (although not this cool). It also lets me pre-set timers for green, black and herbal tea.

Vidya ScreenCapture

There’s actually a bunch of screen capturing utilities, one of them free. This one lets you specify the save location and map the functionality to a hardware button. Plus it’s captures are actual double the size of the screen, or easier cropping. Strangely, their Web site, vidyasmart.com, became one of those sleazy parked sites a week after I purchased it.

Opera Mobile

I’ve got a demo version right now, and I’m unsure if I’m going to buy it. It’s got more features than Internet Explorer, but IE is the only mobile phone browser it’s possible to play Travian on. Opera might be a nice back-up, as none of the browsers I’ve tried get every situation right.

Pocket Music

Also demoing. With that 8GB of memory, I really resent AudibleAir demanding I download only low-quality versions of their audiobooks. PocketMusic brags about being able to play Audible files, and if I can get it to work I’ll be able to sync the phone just like my iPods and not have to worry about Audible’s second-rate software.

There is some freeware available as well.

Google Maps

When you’re just looking up something quick, or need to grab an address or phone number, the Google maps application is great. Since it tracks your position with GPS as well, this can suffice as a poor-man’s TomTom, although it’s better as a compliment than a replacement.

GPX Sonar

This tiny app is a geocacher’s dream. It allows you to view a geocache’s information page from the downloaded GPX file, create field notes and manage travel bugs. It’s not perfect, but the price is right. The original site is no longer available, and the current download page is in German.

PTT_Fix_4Tilt

The Tilt comes loaded with a ton of AT&T shovelware, and a hardware button that launches a screen saying simply, “Push To Talk charges will apply, do you wish to continue?” No, thanks. AT&T’s configuration does not let you re-route this button to another feature as you can the other hardware buttons. This script was developed buy the good folks at XDA-Developers, and let’s you reprogram the button without doing your own registry hacks.

Notes

1. The Wi-Fi Positioning included in the maps feature doesn’t count. Although I haven’t played with it, it seems like it would be pretty clueless where you’d need GPS most–the middle of nowhere. ↩
2. With the Tilt’s AD2P support, I’d love to get a bluetooth stereo headset for it, but the major flaw I’m seeing with bluetooth is the need to constantly re-pair whenever you want to switch devices. I wouldn’t chip for this without being able to switch devices on-the-fly.↩
3. Only once did TomTom fail me. On the way to Zion National Park, TomTom suggested it take a scenic route along the back of a farm and down a two-track that ran up (quite literally, up) the side of a mountain. ↩
4. XDA Developers is a true hacker community. Not one of those 1980’s hollywood depictions, either. These developers explore, disassemble and otherwise make full use of the hardware they have purchased. They take a very strong stance, however, against warez, and greatly respect software developers.

This is too exciting. Corporate executives are starting to learn that the only way to sell things online is not to treat your customers like thieves. Hopefully this new store will convince other vendors to push into the DRM-free download business. As to Microsoft, Walmart I’m not holding my breath, but Yahoo! has already tried.

I can only hope that NBC is next.

Defined, the new album by the group is one of “those CDs” created with rootkit-planting, disingenuous software for which their label was caught and sued. I don’t want to buy the badware, but I love the music. What is a guy to do?

I shopped around for alternatives. Here’s what I found:

What’s the big deal?

Digital Restriction Mechanisms (DRM, and yes I know that’s not what Wikipedia calls it) are built-in encryption that prevents users from copying media distributed electronically. They’re usually owned by a single company and work only in a single context. A laissez-faire capitalist might think this well within the sellers’ rights, but it presents a number of problems most consumers don’t realize. Some of the bigger ones:

No secondary market

Realized the that Justin lied and Sexy never left? There’s no such thing as digital garage sales. DRM music cannot be transferred to another owner.

No fair use

Almost all of contemporary culture was built by derivative works. DRM music does not let you remix it, sample it, or use it in ways protected by fair use provisions of copyright law.

Product lock-in

Imagine having to re-buy your entire CD collection just because you upgraded your player. Or bought a new car. Microsoft’s new Zune does not even play their own DRM. iTunes music is trash if you switch away from an iPod, and Amazon, Napter, et al. won’t work if you use a Mac.

I chose to pay $21 more for my CD. DRM is a social evil, and the extra price is worth the message to Sony/BMG: I vote for freedom.

If you own any CD on this list, have Sony replace it for free, and check your computer if you ever have put the CD into it.

In case you haven’t been following, here’s a rundown of what happened.

• Sony used a new type of DRM scheme that surreptitiously installs software onto your computer.
• Sony’s software installs without permission after inserting the music CD into your drive.
• The software worked so closely to your operating system that it opened up serious security holes and would ruin your drive if removed.
• The world found out.
• The EFF, and others, stood up for the consumers rights, suing Sony.
• The good guys one.

I, luckily, don’t have anything on the list, having bought only three CDs in the past 2 years. I was frightened to notice that some of the artists I own do have CDs on the list, just not mine: Amici Forever, Britney Spears (I know, I know—but I was sixteen and she was prettier before her “knee” surgery), Foo Fighters and Our Lady Peace.

Feeling kind of crazy, I recorded this post as a blogcast. Check it out if wish.

Rob Thomas is an excellent songwriter, but his solo album demonstrates what the musicians behind Matchbox 20 add to their sound. The album is overall, decent. There is however, more problems than the music:

I own an iPod and I used to download all of my music, but have been making a push to remove all of it in favor of legitimate, purchased music. CDs do not work for me: from the office to the car to the home and while working out, the only thing I like to have with me is the size of a deck of cards.

The intelligent people at MELISMA/Atlantic seem to have decided that’s not good enough. Their DualDisc works fine in my car stereo but as soon as I plop it into my PowerBook, it coughs the CD back out. It then sticks in my CD drive and will not eject without forcefully pulling it out. The DVD plays, but once again, it will not eject, sticks in the drive and had to be ejected ten times before I could grab it and pull it out; who knows what kind of damage that is doing.

This CD is going back to Borders/Amazon, and I’ll take my money elsewhere. Perhaps the iTunes Music Store will want it, or perhaps I’ll give up supporting the artist.

And if MELISMA/Atlantic is listening: Get a clue. Stop treating your customers like criminals. I’m not a pirate, I’m a legitimate user, and you’ve lost my $15. I hope you lose more, enough to change your business practices.

This is an example of why Digital Rights Management (DRM) is so terrible. It treats legitimate customers like criminals and encourages piracy. It’s a shame the average customer isn’t aware of this. Please comment with clues as to how that can change.

Jon Stewart. Wow. Sadly, the only source of news I trust (aside from NPR). In one short spot, he made a passionate plea to mainstream media to stop hurting America and called Tucker Carleson a dick (but a smart one, to be fair). My hemming and hawing above was based solely on whether or not he writes his own material, which after some thought doesn’t matter.

Stewart has found, through comedy, a way to do what mosts journalists are too afraid, most politicians too unwilling, and most bloggers have been ignored at for some time. Watching The Daily Show almost…well…daily, I wanted America (The Book) as soon as I heard about it. As my sitting-undisturbed time amounts to way less than my moving-around time, I went instead with an iPod-friendly version from Audible.

I don’t usually go for abridged works, and one review in particular stuck in my mind:

Subject

Funny, despite the content…

Reviewer:

William, from Linwood, NJ, USA

Date:

May 13, 2005

Despite his obvious hatred of the country, Jon Stewart and company from the Daily Show deliver an, at times, fall-out-of-the-chair funny examination of American politics. If you can put out of your mind the obvious liberal/socialist bias and anger, the book is quite enjoyable. Not lost on me, was the irony of Stewart’s attempt to dispute the allegation that the media is a left-leaning, Republican-hating institution, while delivering left-leaning, Republican-hating diatribe after diatribe.
…
I recommend listening to the book while trying to block out the normal reaction, which for most Americans would hopefully be to defend our country against this hilarious assault.

The more I listen to him, the more I find William’s first clause to be incorrect. Stewart writes and performs not out of hatred, but a deep love and sadness over into what our country has desolved. His irony sadly ignores the fact, as did Tucker Carleson, that he is not part of the news media. Nor is The Onion or Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. Perhaps it’s a tribute to his ability—maybe he’s just too good at what he does that America forgets he airs on a network of such journalistic prowess as South Park and Drawn Together.

His rage at the decline of American politics is evident in this excerpt from his Audiobook, which for its inclusion I will probably be added to some Internet smut database, is beautiful nonetheless:

A free and independant press is essential to the health of a functioning democracy, serves to inform the public on matters relevant to its well being. Why they’ve stopped doing that is a mystery. I mean, three-hundred camera crews outside of a courthouse to see what Kobe Bryant is wearing when the judge sets his hearing date while false information used to send our country to war goes unchecked—what the fuck happened? You spineless cowards in the press have finally gone to far: you have violated a trust.

“Was the President successful in conving the country?” Who gives a shit? Why not tell us if what he said was true?

And the excuses—my god—the excuses: “Hey, we just give the people what they want. What can we do, this administration is secretive…uh…uh…but the last season of Friends is news.”

The unmitigated gall of these weak-willed—you’re supposed to be helping us, you indecent piles of shit—I…Fuck it, just fuck it!

And that about sums it up. I couldn’t say it better. But now that he’s pointed out the problem, what about the solution?

…and now I have a hero. Plus, he makes movies with Adam Sandler, which immediate adds points on some peoples’ lists…

Compared to Pslaters, the headliners, Madison Greene was more lively, more spiritual and more friendly. Their set consists of an acoustic guitar, electric base, tin whistle and a set of tribal drums of every shape and size. Their lyrics combine West African tunes with American spirituality, political disaproval and questioning of the church.

MG makes the type of music that makes you lose yourself and dance. Not some perverted grinding, but free, unencumbered joy—the way dancing was meant to be.