SpellCast Plays from Sectus Now Available

Spellcast is proud to present the two podcast plays recorded live July 20th at Sectus, the London Harry Potter convention. Both plays are by george Pushdragon, and take a humorous look at a lawsuit by the Estate of Sirius Black, and the conditions at Azkaban prison.

You can download both plays here, and later today it'll be on iTunes.

Honestly! Who is in charge of Occupational Health & Safety at the Ministry? Brains in tanks and unmarked dimensional portals! In this little trial transcript, Sirius' estate gets litigious, Fudge talks facial hair, Lucius struggles with life in the clink, and Albus Dumbledore has only one buttock. Naturally.

Of course, we would like to thank everyone who took part in the play, the Sectus Committee, as well as the wonderful live audience at the recording.

If you have any comments or would like to take part in future SpellCast Theater productions, feel free to email us, and as always, don't forget to vote for SpellCast on PodcastAlley!

Also, if you want to read posts on the SpellCast_LJ livejournal on your InsaneJournal, click here; you can add them to GoogleReader here.

A Literary Celebration of the Greatest Moment in Second Life

(Not yet in Second Life? Check out http://secondlife.com)

To celebrate the last book of the Harry Potter novels, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the Caledon Library and FictionAlley wish to invite you to the Harry Potter Celebration on:

July 20th from 6-9 PM SLT

The event will start at the Caledon Academy of Virtual Wizardry - Caledon Highlands (165, 228, 39) where you will be sorted into your houses.

Event activities include:
Sorting hat - Caledon Academy of Virtual Wizardry from 6-9 PM SLT
Costume contest - Lovelace, voting starts @ 7 PM SLT with the winner being announced at 7:30 PM SLT
Dancing & Music - Lovelace 6-9 PM SLT
Trivia contest - Turn in notecards between 6-8 PM SLT, winner announced at 8:30 PM SLT
Role-play - FictionAlley 6-9 PM SLT

Contest winners will receive a lovely cup and one lucky person will receive a Nimbus 2000. A HUD will be provided for easy traveling. Join the group Harry Potter Celebration so that you can listen to all the Harry Potter talk.

Refreshments will be provided!

This event could not have happened without the generous support from the following:

Caledon Academy of Virtual Wizardry - Desmond Shang, Carl Metropolitan
Caledon Library - CoyoteAngel Dimsum, JJ Drinkwater, Lady Shackle, Kghia Gherardi, Turing Weyland
IMAX - Brody Waydelich
Lovelace - CoyoteAngel Dimsum
Reader’s Garden - Princess Ivory, Alphonsus Peck, Alliance Library System

Please remember that this is meant to be a party like those found in RL for the release of the Harry Potter novels, please be respectful of the landowner’s, fellow party attendees, and the rights of J.K. Rowling.

Spoiler Rules on FictionAlley: An Update

Crossposted from here.

1. We cannot absolutely prevent people from registering with spoilery usernames, so we have turned off the display of logged in users, the list of birthdays and the name of the newest member from the front page; it will all be turned back on on July 22, 2007.

2. We are not going to moderate all posts in all forums, so there is a risk of seeing spoilers in any of the forums. The mods will try to hide spoilery content as it appears.

3. No spoilers, other than the first few lines of the first chapter, will be allowed on this site until one minute after midnight in the UK, as said content violates JK Rowling's copyright.

4. We will not approve any fanfic that contains spoilers, other than those permitted in #3 above, until after July 24, 2007.

5. As of one second after midnight, UK time on July 21, 2007, spoilers for DH can be posted without spoiler-tags in the DH discussion forum and its Chapter by Chapter by Chapter and When It's Over subforums. Spoilers for DH can be posted in all other forums only if they are posted within spoiler-tags; this means that thread titles cannot contain spoilers at all (with a small exception for SCUSA/Ship Staff thread titles).

We understand that there may be people who want to start ships for characters who are new to the Potterverse in Book Seven; until August 1, 2007, all new ships posted in SCUSA and/or the Ship Staff forums should be identified in the title by initials only. In other words, if Harry was a new character in Book Seven, a proper thread title for a ship including him would be "HP/____ - Woobiest Ever!" or "HJP/______ - Woobiest Ever!" We will not allow thread titles in SCUSA that include any new character's full name. Posts in the Declaring a New Ship thread can include full names within the spoiler tag.

OotP Premiere in LA

Higher resolution version coming July 16, 2007.

Good News From the Server Recovery Team

Thank you Andy and Paul and others - and the folks at Dragon.com - for fixing the IPs and initiating loading the fic content onto the new server!

The front page on FA is normal again, with a note on the top explaining what's happening and sending people to the blog, which is all good. Fics are slowly coming back online and they should all be up by Thursday.

The Fic Submission Form is working again for submissions and if you're on the Queue Bypass list your fic will be auto-processed, but we won't be able to send fics back for editing until the mailserver is up and that might not be til early Friday. So start submitting but know that it might take more than ten days for the fic to get online (although we're going to try and clear the whole queue before DH comes out).

I'm off to breathe a giant sigh of relief now...

Photos from the OotP Premiere

ArtisticAlley is the location for the SpellCast gallery of photos from the premiere of Order of the Phoenix in Los Angeles on July 8, 2007. Click here to see the whole gallery!

Server Recovery Update

Here's the latest on the fic recovery process:

All
the fics are still there, but unfortunately, we have to rebuild the server and that section of the site before they're accessible. You should be able to find many fics via Archive.org by clicking here. The review pages for all fics are still live and accessible via the Park.

This server also hosted our outgoing mail, and that's why you haven't received updates on thread subscriptions, new reviews, etc. That should be working by the end of this week.

We hope to reopen for new fic submissions for a few days before Book Seven is released, but if not, we will reopen for new submissions two or three days after the book comes out - the fic intakers need a chance to read the book first.

Of course, FictionAlley Park is still open for discussion, writing workshops, Book Seven theorizing and off topic chat here and you can enjoy listening to fanfic at our SpellCast podcast.

If you have any specific questions, please ask us in Suggestions & Questions or email the Help Desk at help @ fictionalley.org.

Photos from the Red Carpet

We're uploading images from the Premiere on Sunday - here's two to start with:

Greetings from Los Angeles! We're checking out Mann's Chinese Theater,
where the LA premiere of OotP begins in just under 24 hours...

SpellCast Heads to LA; Server In the "Getting Fixed" Stage

We've been working closely with our server hosts over the last two days to get FictionAlley back online. It sounds like we can get all of our data back but it's likely that a day or two of fic submissions will be completely missing - we will know more when we actually are able to look over the data.

For now, we're pointing all the front pages on the site to this Blog, so you can keep tabs on the restoration process, and enjoy the coverage of the premiere in LA that we'll be providing over the next few days. Robert from SpellCast is already in LA and I'll be joining him tomorrow, along with SC's Venessa and Zorb. Let us know if you're going to be in the crowd at Mann's Chinese Theater on Sunday and we'll keep an eye out for you!

We hope to have the fics back online on Monday or Tuesday. For now, if you need a fic-fix, or want to discuss your theories about Book Seven or the sneak peeks about Order of the Phoenix: The Movie, visit FictionAlley Park.

Major Hard Drive Crash

Hi all.

Bad timing, isn't it?

Our main hard drive - the one that hosts all the fics and the "static" informational pages - has become physically damaged at our ISP's hosting location.

We're in the process of doing a major data recovery, but it might take a day or three more.

We'd planned to close submissions next week in the lead-up to the release of Deathly Hallows, but it looks like we need to do that now - we'll try to reopen for a few days pre-release but since it's all hardware-dependent, we can't guarantee when or for how long.

The forums are still working, and if you know exact urls of stories, you should be able to read them via Archive.org - you can even find urls (if you know the author or title) via our Chapter Owls Yahoogroup or Google Group. Obviously, we've had to close to new submissions until we get this worked out, but we hope to reopen soon.

Email us at help@fictionalley.org or post a comment here if you have any questions.

Vidcast from Order of the Phoenix Premiere in London

SpellCast producer Sidney got to speak with much of the cast, as well as producer David Heyman and screenwriter Michael Goldenberg - and even caught a few moments of JK Rowling speaking to other reporters - at the premiere of Order of the Phoenix in London on July 3, 2007.

Enjoy the whole vidcast below!



You can also download the whole vidcast by right-clicking here, then selecting SAVE, or view it on Google Videos.

A higher resolution version of the first ten minutes of the vidcast is on our YouTube page.

Feel free to embed the vidcast, and let us know if you want to mirror it.

HPANA has a terrific collection of links to articles about the premiere, coverage by other media, and images from the premiere and the afterparty.

Added July 10, 2007: You can find the transcript of the vidcast here - many thanks to new SpellCast Team Member Michelletiara!