A good friend last week wrote to me saying that he had been invited to give a talk about Harry Potter at a local bookstore and he was flummoxed about how to introduce the ring composition idea without using PowerPoint slides projected on a screen. The bookstore didn’t have a projector or a screen or even a blank wall.
I was in exactly the same position in 2012 when I gave a series of “Ten Things You Didn’t Know About [Each of the Harry Potter titles]” at Oklahoma City’s wonderful independent bookstore, Full Circle. Incredibly, that talk was recorded and I still have a copy to embed here to illustrate my solution to the problem: hook your laptop up to a large flat screen television set and put it on the table next to where you’re speaking. For a crowd of thirty or less, if you’ve made the slides with a large typeface, it works like a dream.
I post this tonight to say to my friend, “If I could do this in 2012 without any technical assistance while maintaining full Luddire status, you can do this in 2025 while standing on your head and juggling” (he is very accomplished at all things technological and computers).
And, no, I have not watched this video through, and, yes, I disavow everything I said that is contrary to what I have learned and said in the almost decade and a half since I put that talk together!
