Canberras own leading Potter nerd

harry potter is ok…. yeah a little strange for a 17 year old to be obsessed but who really cares.. a bit concerning what those crazy christians and religious types say about it all thoug.. when what they believe is a far more dangerous fairy tale..

Simto – you’re right. Reminds me of an Onion point-counterpoitn article that had a stats obsessed D&D nerd going on about every characteristic of different elves and goblins, then a jock mocking him for being a nerd, and then going on in detail about some quarterbacks yard throwage for the steelers in 1967. I think the message is: Never try.

I do like the fact that we’re ludicrously inflating the Canberra Time’s attempt at making a non-local story (the announcement of the publishing date of HP7) a local story (ooh look, one of their fanboys lives here!).

You are right, he isn’t normal. He should be masturbating, like all over 17 year old boys. Ah, the memories.

Well, Jebus isn’t praised in the Harry Potter books, for one thing.

And, hey, for mine there’s very little difference between a Harry Potter fansite and a rugby fansite. Except that one directs you towards reading and one directs you towards bashing your head together with similarly inclined young men.

The Harry Potter books make for entertaining reading for many of the world’s children (and lots of its grownups too). The thing is for people to remember, especially the young and impressionable, is that it’s just a story, albeit a good one.

I’m all for having hobbies and enjoying books (I am a regular fiction reader), but it isn’t real. Keeping these things in perspective makes for healthy humans, methinks.

And potter is different how?

Narnia, book and movie, are absolute pants. Boring, old, white-is-right English naffness so insultingly stupid as to even reduce any sarcastic fun you could have had with it’s ‘praise Jebers, kill darkies’ message.

a naf site ?

we’re kind of the opposite of a fan site…

JB, you aren’t planning on turning this into a fanboy site over the next few days are you….Unless of course you can get me 30k, in which case…go for it.

It said the site gets $30k in ad revenue, not that he personally makes that much profit. There’s also a note on the site that says all the cash goes towards server maintenance and bandwidth. Also bear in mind the other “nearly 30” staff mentioned in the article.

Anyway, better Harry Potter than Dan Brown.

Kerces: all hobbies seem like a waste of time to those who don’t participate. Playing with miniature soldiers, hitting balls with sticks, making websites, writing “citizen journalist” articles about Raiderette tryouts… don’t these people have better things to do with their time? Normal is relative.

I was going to say, who are you talking about schmerica?

Oh, JB’s older than 31…

I find the 31yr old forum administrator a little disturbing

$30k and the odd free overseas trip seems like pretty productive use of his time if you ask me. If he’s going to be a computer geek anyway, might as well enjoy it and profit from it.

almost never…

it’s never too late to start living sam.

I suppose people like me just don’t see the point in being considered normal, and people like you can’t see why we just don’t get it. Perhaps we shouldn’t waste our breath on each other.

It’s not about what you do Sambo, it’s about how much you do it to the exclusion of everything else.

MAybe he should be pulling bongs under the bridge with his stoner mates?

I mean thats what was normal when I was 17.

Sheesh.

Sam, large, middle-aged men sweating in a hot tin shed playing with little painted men isn’t normal.

$30K a year running a site? Sheesh.

As soon as I read this post I was reminded of Elias from Clerks II 😉

The kid is flown all around the world to meet & greet literary\film promotions & marketing people, _at someone else’s expense_.
Despite what you might think about the topic he’s encouraging, they think he’s got potential to be exploited, he gets connections for later life if he decides to use them.
So long as he’s aware of it, and doesn’t think its all a terrific gig to be abused, more power to him.
If though, he’s already living like an adult at their peak, and rorting it for all its worth, then he can fade back into obscurity once the whole Harry Potter and the Recycled Marketing Campaign gig wears thin.

Perhaps you guys missed the caption on the photo. The website nets him $30k a year. He’d have to work a lot of shifts at Maccas to bring in the same sort of student income.

Harry Potter is not my thing but if that’s what Andy wants to do then so be it. There are plenty of people (myself included) who were/are not considered normal during their teenage years, and in most cases there is nothing to stop them from living a happy and healthy life.

There was a war games convention in Canberra recently (again, not my thing) which as far as I could tell was mainly middle aged men conducting miniature wars, yet I don’t recall hearing the cries of “it’s not normal” when that was on.

I don’t see the difference.

How boring this world would be if we were all “normal”.

oh my god.

im just slightly jealous that he gets to go overseas to meet daniel radcliffe and such. (yeah, just slightly :D)

but i personally dont think its normal for a 17 year old boy to be spending this much time on the computer making a harry potter site..

I agree with you johnny, It’s good that it gets kids reading, never been a fan but it is just a bit over the top to create a site about harry potter and spend most of your young adult life maintaining it.

GO OUT AND GET A LIFE KID!!!