Harry Potter Creator JK Rowling Releases First Instalment of New Web Series

Harry Potter creator JK Rowling Tuesday released the first instalment of a four-part online short-story series titled 'History of Magic in North America'.

The latest writing from the 50-year-old celebrated author tells the magical history of America and is available to read on her 'Pottermore' website.

The first piece is titled 'Fourteenth Century - Seventeenth Century' and uncovers the world of Native American witches and wizards, revealing the truth behind the "legendary skin walkers".

While these shape-shifters were rumoured to have acquired their power through killing a family member, Rowling reveals that they were actually Animagi - wizards and witches who have developed the ability to transform into an animal at will - a term used in the Harry Potter books as well.

Rowling writes that "the Native American magical community and those of Europe and Africa had known about each other long before the immigration of European No-Majs in the seventeenth century".

Rowling also explains that Native American wizards are better at making potions than European wizards, but do not use wands like their counterparts across the world.

She writes: "The magic wand originated in Europe. Wands channel magic so as to make its effects both more precise and more powerful, although it is generally held to be a mark of the very greatest witches and wizards that they have also been able to produce wandless magic of a very high quality".

"As the Native American Animagi and potion-makers demonstrated, wandless magic can attain great complexity, but Charms and Transfiguration are very difficult without one," she wrote.

The set of short stories are linked to the release later this year of theHarry Potter spin-off prequel film 'Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them', set in New York 70 years before the events of the Harry Potter books.

The film stars British Oscar-winning actor Eddie Redmayne as Newt Scamander, author of the titular textbook which is used at Hogwarts magic school by Harry Potter and others.

Today's 400-word story is the opening of the magical American history to be published on Pottermore each day this week until Friday.

Rowling started the Pottermore website as a home of information about what happened to the characters before and after the Harry Potter series was set.

Virtual reality set to transform filmmaking

Chris Milk stepped onto a TED Conference stage and took the audience on an awe-inducing trip into the future of movies. While much of the early attention on virtual reality has focused on use of the immersive technology in video games, Milk and his US startup Vrse are using it to transform storytelling and filmgoing. "We have just started to scratch the surface of the true power of virtual reality," Milk said. "It's not a video game peripheral. It connects humans to other humans in a profound way... I think virtual reality has the potential to actually change the world." He had everyone in the Vancouver audience at TED , which ended Friday, hold Google Cardboard viewers to their eyes for what was billed as the world's collective virtual reality experience. Google Cardboard gear is literally that -- cardboard

Explained: Camera Improvements in the New HTC 10

With the HTC 10, the Taiwanese company is promising to undo the past wrongs in the cameras of its previous flagship phones. The camera has long a weak point in HTC devices. At first, HTC sacrificed image resolution in the M8 and made the size of individual pixels larger to capture more light (what HTC called Ultrapixel). But the resulting 4 megapixel images were often fuzzy, especially when cropped or enlarged. To fix the issue, in its next flagship - the M9 - HTC went with smaller individual pixels in a 20-megapixel camera last year, but it still underperformed in extreme situations, such as indoors and close-ups. In the HTC 10, the company attempts to strike a balance with larger individual pixels (1.55µm), but not as large as before and a 12 megapixel sensor in its camera coupled with a ƒ/1.8 lens. HTC accepts that in the imaging performance in the M9 was not up to the kind of spec of what they really like to see in a flagship. HTC is giving a slight boost to the selfi...

Freedom 251: 30,000 Units Sold, Components for Up to 2.5 Million Will Be Imported

Ringing Bells, the makers of the Rs. 251 smartphone - the Freedom 251 - confirmed to Gadgets 360 on Tuesday that it has still only accepted payments for 30,000 units of the phone. It also added that the components for these phones will be imported, and only assembled in India, not made here. Ringing Bells stopped accepting orders on February 19, and claims to have received over 70 million registrations. The company President and Director both repeatedly stated that the price of the phone would be made possible through economies of scale, and making the phone in India to cut out import costs. Economies of scale? However, in a discussion with Gadgets 360 the company revealed that it had only sold 30,000 units of the phone on day one. The company has now confirmed that it has not sent out the payment emails to anyone else who registered - "we were working out details of cash on delivery, which we are announcing now, so we will be sending emails to the first 2.5...

IntellectBeat

Search This Blog