With the recent news of Yahoo’s potential acquisition by vile Microsoft and its prior layoff of 1000 hardworking geeks, there was a bit of an air of piracy in the office last week.
Linden Lab is going into another round of recruitment, focusing on web developers, QA folk, and other nerdy types. If any web developers out there (you, yes, YOU Joy!) want to work in a more stable, hilarious, and weird environment, you might want to fill out an application to work at Second Life. Free beer, the Love Machine, and a frightening amount of RockBand can all be yours!
Linden seems to be where the socially-developed nerds go to work. There’s a much larger % of women, extroverts, parents, and charmers working at Linden than is considered industry standard. Which means you tend to not find yourself in conversations with dudes who can’t make eye contact with a girl, or folks who get REALLY EMOTIONAL about their code.
It’s good to be a god, too, even if it’s only in-world. You can read more about our wickedcool office culture in the Tao of Linden.
I just listened to Harry Potter 6 on my iPod--all 17 discs worth of it. It was a long haul, but the audio recordings are very very good.
I have some predictions about the upcoming seventh book and I want to document them here. First, I'd like to say that I do not read fan sites and I have not gotten sucked into debates about Harry Potter anywhere else. Being a fiction writer myself, I recognize that getting embroiled in an argument about what is going to happen in an upcoming piece of fiction is perhaps more ridiculous than fighting over what the weather is going to be like next month.
That being said, here are my predictions:
Snape: I believe that Snape is not as evil as we've been led to believe. I think he dispensed with Dumbledore for a specific reason, but I believe Dumbledore was right in trusting Snape. Dumbledore was too smart and Snape was too obviously evil for me to believe that Dumbledore just made an error in character judgment, which led to his demise. Dumbledore had a reason to trust Snape and I'm siding with Dumbledore on this one. That being said, I believe Dumbledore may play a role in book 7, but I believe he will remain dead. After all, he had quite a kick-ass funeral!
The DA: Dumbledore's Army (the D.A.) is the future. I think book 7 will reveal that Voldemort's operatives have compromised the Ministry of Magic more than we ever realized--all the way up to the top. I think that book 7 will see a huge upheaval that will lead to the toppling of the magical government. The aurors will be killed or rendered powerless and the DA will rise to the occasion and clean house.
Horcruxes: I'm not sure whether this has been postulated, but I think Harry himself is a horcrux. For those of you not into Harry Potter and just reading this to humor me, a horcrux (according to book 6) is when a powerful wizard splits their soul and implants it into an inanimate object in order to make the wizard more difficult to destroy. It is believed that Voldemort split his soul into 7 parts. All the way back to the first time we saw the Sorting Hat and it said Harry should be in Slytherin, I knew Harry had some part of him that was evil. I believe that Voldemort was trying to kill Harry to impart his soul fragment into an inanimate object and something went wrong that resulted in Voldemort's soul fragment to be implanted in Harry.
The Prophesy: The prophesy states, "either must die at the hand of the other for neither can live while the other survives." This prophesy is worded very strangely and very carefully, is it not? I think this goes back to the issue of the horcrux. With part of Voldemort's soul within Harry, neither can live while the other survives. In other words, Harry can never be free with part of Voldemort inside of him and Voldemort can never live while Harry is still alive, since Voldemort would need that fragment back if he is to truly live.
Does Harry Die: When it's all finished, I believe Harry is going to live. If you've read my entire post, you'll know that the DA will need a leader and Harry has been aiming to be an auror for the past few years. People are talking all over the place about whether Harry is going to die in this book 7. Perhaps I am an eternal optimist, but I think Harry is going to live. He serves a direct function and he needs to go on to see to the rebirth of the magic world. Despite the prophesy, its strange wording leads me to believe JK Rowling has a loophole up the sleeve of her magical robes.
And that's all I'm going to say about Harry Potter. It's only 2 months away until the book's release and we'll see if I'm right! So, why in the title of this blog entry do I say that I hope I'm wrong, you ask? That's easy.
I want to be surprised!
