Grab your wand! No matter which house you were sorted into Harry Potter fans know the story of the Half-Blood Prince. Jan. 9 marks Severus Snape’s birthday and now you can celebrate by reading the entire Harry Potter series for free through the public library with the e-reading app, Libby by OverDrive.
Libby allows readers to borrow and read ebooks and audiobooks from your local public library for free. Access ebooks, audiobooks, and magazines from your library using your phone or tablet.
All that’s needed to read all seven wizarding world books is a public library card. If readers don’t have one, they can sign up for the Instant Digital Card with a phone number in less than 30 seconds.
British actor Helen McCrory, who starred in the television show “Peaky Blinders” and the “Harry Potter” movies, has died, her husband said Friday. She was 52 and had been suffering from cancer.
Her husband, fellow actor Damian Lewis, said McCrory died “peacefully at home” after a “heroic battle with cancer.”
“She died as she lived. Fearlessly,” Lewis wrote on Twitter. “God we love her and know how lucky we are to have had her in our lives. She blazed so brightly. Go now, Little One, into the air, and thank you.”
McCrory was one of Britain’s most respected actors, making her mark by playing a succession of formidable and sometimes fearsome women.
She played the matriarch of a crime family on “Peaky Blinders” and the scheming Voldemort ally Narcissa Malfoy in the “Harry Potter” movies.
Onstage, her roles included the vengeful Greek heroine “Medea” at the National Theatre in 2014. At the same theater, she excelled as a woman caught between a dull husband and a feckless lover in Terence Rattigan’s “The Deep Blue Sea” in 2016.
While many performers struggle to find meaty female roles in film and television, McCrory played a string of them.
“Having said that, there are a lot of things I turn down,” she told The Associated Press in 2016, describing the sort of roles where “all your lines are ‘But what did you do at work?’ ‘That’s so clever, darling.’ ‘How did you do that?’ ‘And then what did you do?'”
“Of course, there’s so much sexism within the profession,” McCrory said. “But I think you approach it in different ways, and my approach is just to forge forward.”
After completely nailing her performance as Meg March in Greta Gerwig’s Little Women adaptation, Emma Watson has made a surprising career move — she has, at least for now, chosen not to take on any new acting roles. Her absence from the Hollywood scene has been so notable that earlier this year, rumors began to swirl that she had retired from acting.
Britain’s Helen McCrory, who starred in Harry Potter films and the Peaky Blinders television series, has died after a battle with cancer, her husband, actor Damian Lewis, said on Twitter on Friday. She was 52.
“I’m heartbroken to announce that after an heroic battle with cancer, the beautiful and mighty woman that is Helen McCrory has died peacefully at home, surrounded by a wave of love from friends and family,” Lewis said.
“She died as she lived. Fearlessly. God we loved her and know how lucky we are to have had her in our lives. She blazed so brightly. Go now, Little One, into the air, and thank you.”
Acting career began on stage
McCrory played Polly Gray, the matriarch of a crime family on Peaky Blinders, taking a starring role in all five seasons thus far.
The show’s official Twitter account posted a tribute to the actor and her time as Polly soon after news of her death broke.
Cillian Murphy, who plays the central role of gangland boss Tommy Shelby in Peaky Blinders, set in the early 20th-century English underworld, said he was “broken-hearted to lose such a dear friend.”
“Helen was a beautiful, caring, funny, compassionate human being,” he said in a statement. “She was also a gifted actor — fearless and magnificent.
“She elevated and made humane every scene, every character she played. It was a privilege to have worked with this brilliant woman, to have shared so many laughs over the years. I will dearly miss my pal. My love and thoughts are with Damian and her family.”
Helen McCrory as Polly GraybrbrAll our love and thoughts are with Helen’s family. brbrRest in peace. a href=”https://t.co/HBEg4Hz2Up”pic.twitter.com/HBEg4Hz2Up/a
Harry Potterauthor J.K. Rowling also took to Twitter to pay respects, calling McCrory “an extraordinary actress and a wonderful woman who’s left us far too soon.”
McCrory portrayed the scheming Narcissa Malfoy in the Harry Potter movies — with her last appearance in the series’ final entry Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2. She also appeared in Martin Scorsese’s Hugo, James Bond movie Skyfall, and the TV series His Dark Materials last year.
Earlier in 2000, McCrory starred in a Channel 4 adaptation of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. In an article for the British newspaper the Guardian, McCrory wrote about the play and how the main character’s journey reflected modern life as a woman.
“How should a woman live her life? By the end of the story, Anna’s choice is to return to her husband, disgraced, and live a lie, or to say: ‘I did it, I’ve lived and that’s enough,’ McCrory wrote. “She jumps, not from something but to something. There is no defeat. It’s wonderful to see a woman playing the heroine.”
McCrory performs as Yelena in the play Uncle Vanya at the Brooklyn Academy of Music Harvey Theater on Jan. 16, 2003, in New York City. (Matthew Peyton/Getty Images)
McCrory was born in 1968 in London to Welsh and Scottish parents Anne and Iain McCrory.
Though she saw great success on the screen, McCrory’s career first took off from the stage.
She was a regular in U.K. theatre, and made a name for herself playing Rose Trelawny in Trelawny of ‘Wells’ in 1993, and Lady Macbeth in the 1995 West End production of the Shakespearean tragedy.
She later received three awards, including a London Evening Standard award, for her portrayal of Yelena in Uncle Vanya, and was nominated for an Olivier award for her performance in As You Like It.
McCrory poses with husband Damian Lewis after she was awarded an OBE (Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) by Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace on Nov. 7, 2017 in London, England. ( Steve Parsons/Getty Images)
Though she had roles as far back as the early ’90s — her first was in Interview with the Vampire with Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise — her film career took off in 2006. That year, she earned a best supporting actress nomination from the London Critics’ Circle for her work in The Queen.
McCrory married Damian Lewis the following year, and they had a daughter together.
She had been slated to play the villainous Bellatrix Lestrange in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, but was forced to pull out due to her pregnancy. She was later cast as Bellatrix’s sister, Narcissa Malfoy.
We are deeply saddened to hear of the passing of our beloved Helen McCrory, who played Narcissa Malfoy with such depth and brilliance in the Harry Potter film series. She was a wonderful actor and a very dear friend; Harry Potter fans will miss her very much. a href=”https://t.co/wXexuxFNyG”pic.twitter.com/wXexuxFNyG/a
McCrory and Lewis had a second child in 2008, and in a 2018 interview, Lewis said they made the “difficult” decision to continue working while their children were young.
McCrory’s commitment to work seemed to pay off. While many performers struggle to find meaty female roles in film and television, she played a string of them.
“Having said that, there are a lot of things I turn down,” she told The Associated Press in 2016, describing the sort of roles where “all your lines are ‘But what did you do at work?’ ‘That’s so clever, darling.’ ‘How did you do that?’ ‘And then what did you do?’ “
“Of course, there’s so much sexism within the profession,” McCrory said. “But I think you approach it in different ways, and my approach is just to forge forward.”
Lynch told the brothers that prior to being cast as Luna, she was an avid visitor on Mugglenet, a popular “Harry Potter” fan site, where she dabbled in reading and writing fan fiction.
Lynch is a self-proclaimed ‘Harry Potter’ superfan
Evanna Lynch was a “Harry Potter” fan long before she joined the cast.
Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP
On Mugglenet, she read forums and followed along with the creation of the movies with the huge community of fans online. Lynch even said she contributed to the fandom.
“I actually did get into fan fiction for a little bit … Who was I writing about? I was probably writing about Luna … I was definitely a big part of the community,” she said.
During the interview, Lynch said that after reading the first “Harry Potter” book when she was 8 years old, she was totally enthralled with the fantastical story and relatable characters.
“I got utterly obsessed,” the actress said. “… It just took over my whole identity. I loved it so much.”
She said she also plastered her bedroom walls with “Harry Potter” posters.
She was picked to play Luna from a group of thousands of fellow auditioners
Evanna Lynch as Luna Lovegood.
Warner Bros.
Lynch also recalled her whirlwind audition story on the “Normal Not Normal” podcast.
After writing directly to the production team asking if she could play Luna, she saw on Mugglenet that they were holding an open casting call in London.
She was one of the thousands of 13- to 16-year-old girls who showed up to the audition, and after waiting for hours, she got in front of the casting director.
In the end, she was singled out and chosen for the part of Luna Lovegood.
Once she was on set, she found it hard to shake her fangirl past
Daniel Radcliffe and Evanna Lynch in “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.”
Warner Bros.
Once Lynch was cast in the fifth movie, she said she “felt like a bit of a traitor” for knowing all the “secrets” and having to keep them from this online community.
She said she also felt starstruck by her coworkers.
She told the Phelps twins that she didn’t know how to act around all the stars when she got to the set for the first time.
“I was stalking everyone,” Lynch said. “… When people would be like ‘How are you? What do you like?’ I’d be like, ‘You.'”
In addition to feeling weird about knowing so much about the actors’ personal lives from years of following them from afar, Lynch said she often felt “inferior” on set.
The second part of her “Normal Not Normal” interview is set to be released this week.
Read More:
‘Harry Potter’ stars James and Oliver Phelps didn’t know which Weasley twin they were playing until right before filming the first movie
Zynga has added a new in-game event series for their magical match-3 game, Harry Potter: Puzzles Spells. This will be the game’s first-ever Club Challenge. The event is already globally active and challenges player’s clubs to enter the Forbidden Forest, a new interactive map that is filled with obstacles and enticing encounters but will provide amazing rewards for those who manage to complete it.
Considering that event is supposed to be challenging, you also need to prove your worth to gain access to it in the first place. The Club Challenge is only open to players after they reach level 55 and while it is a club challenge, the event does open up an entirely new and interactive path that can be completed solo by providing independent points, rewards and a “lives” system in each event.
Yaron Levyand, Executive Vice President, Games at Zynga said, “The Club Challenge event introduces a blend of excitement, mystery and friendship that is core to the Harry Potter series and allows players to connect and collaborate with Clubmates in more meaningful ways.”
These Club Challenges last for a period of three weeks before being replaced by a new one, and each new challenge will bring with it a new map filled with puzzles and quests to continue the player’s journeys.
The lives system I spoke of above is basically a feature where you get three lives for a specific Club Challenge, and these can be earned by earning points for completing puzzles.
As for the more cooperative features, since these are Club events, members of the same club can collaborate to traverse through the map, working together and completing puzzles to further their league rankings.
For the first Club Challenge, players will leave the comfort of Hogwarts and enter the uncharted and mythical Forbidden Forest, unearthing rare artefacts like the coveted House Cup or the Sword of Gryffindor. These will grant you access to the final puzzle, where you’ll have to defeat the most horrifying monsters in the forest. They are the Mountain Troll, the Hungarian Horntail and Ron’s most despicable foe, Aragog.
We all know we shouldn’t use 1234 as our password. But we often don’t do the absolute best practice when it comes to passwords. After all, you should have some obscure strange password that is unique for every site. But we all have lots of passwords, so most of us use $pock2020 or something like that. If you know I’m a Star Trek fan, that wouldn’t be super hard to guess. [Phani] writes about a technique called Horcruxing — a term taken from the literary realm of Harry Potter that allowed Voldemort to preserve life by splitting it into multiple parts, all of which were required to bring an end to his villany. [Phani’s] process promises to offer better security than using a single password, without the problems associated with having hundreds of random passwords.
Most people these days use some form of password manager. That’s great because the manager can create 48 character passwords of random words or symbols and even you don’t know the password. Of course, you do know the master password or, at least, you better. So if anyone ever compromised that password, they’d have all your passwords at their fingers. Horcruxing makes sure that the password manager doesn’t know the entire password, just the hard parts of it.
Here’s how it works. Suppose you decide your personal horcrux string will be HamNCheese. That’s easy to remember and spell. It isn’t a great password all by itself. However, the idea is to never store that string in your password manager. Instead, you store a unique prefix and you have to add the horcrux.
If the password manager, for example, creates a password of 4337feeb90210, then you’d set the actual password to be 4337feeb90210HamNCheese. This means you’d have to set the password manager to not auto-submit the login form, of course. Once it filled in its part, you’ll have to add the extra string. Now if someone compromises your password manager, it doesn’t help them unless they also know your horcrux which, obviously, you should keep super secret.
This doesn’t help if someone phishes your password from you or otherwise intercepts it using, say, a keystroke logger. But it does seem like it has some value of preventing your password database from being a useful target. You’ll probably have to figure the best way to configure not only to prevent automatic submission but also to stop the password manager from helpfully trying to update your password every time you enter the horcrux, but that’s a small thing.
[Phani] doesn’t mention it, but it reminded us of the problem with security questions, too. It is reasonably easy to research people and find things like their mother’s maiden name or where they went to high school. The best solution is to have a made-up identity that you use to answer those questions. So your mother’s maiden name might be Pfffft and your older brother’s middle name might be MiddleName. The problem, of course, is keeping all that straight. Maybe you can store it in your password manager.
This made me think about other life events that cannot be delayed. Eighteen months of on-and-off lockdowns have made many of us acutely aware of lost time. For some, who started lockdown in their early 30s, say, the experience will have amplified desires to start a family.
Recently it was reported that BreastScreen NSW was shut during lockdown. This seemed insane. I’d spent the past nine years reading the poster in the bathroom at work telling me that, while a manual test can feel a lump the size of a cherry, a breast screen can find a lump the size of a pea. A delay of three to four months imposed by lockdown will have an impact on treatment. Dr Robert Bezimienny wrote about the impact of patients belatedly reporting symptoms from heart concerns to cancer due to fear of COVID exposure, or not wanting to put pressure on the health system.
But nor can experiences delayed be made up for. More children drowned last summer due to children not having swimming lessons during lockdowns. Experiences build on themselves, like a child’s sandcastle, grain upon grain. Having a gap in them is to never reach the heights intended.
For adults, our brains are pretty much set, but the child and teenager’s brain is constantly developing and learning, and that happens through experience. With fewer experiences – though more of being at home on their own – their brains are going to shape differently.
You cannot have a rush, post-lockdown, on the experience of arguing with a friend over whose Beyblade toy is the best, or how to ollie on a skateboard. Kids have lost those experiences. And while, yes, they will have other experiences after lockdown, they will be built on a gap where experiences should have been.
“Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” is the epic conclusion to one of the most beloved franchises of all time.
Potterheads pride themselves on their in-depth knowledge of all things Harry, Hogwarts, and the Wizarding World, but even the most eagle-eyed fans are bound to miss one or two things in the movie, either on-screen or off-screen.
We go through the final “Harry Potter” and pick out 18 things you might not have known — scroll down and see how many you already knew.
From the chess pieces in “The Sorcerer’s Stone” popping up in the Room of Requirement to Bellatrix’s position with Voldemort to the potential casting of Kate Winslet, there’s bound to be something you might have missed.
“Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — Part 2” is the epic conclusion to that film series, and features easter eggs and behind the scenes facts that even the most dedicated Potterheads might have missed or may not be aware of.
From the potential casting of Oscar-winner Kate Winslet to “The Sorcerer’s Stone” chess pieces making an appearance in the Room of Requirement, there might just be something you missed.
Harry Potter: Puzzles Spells has stormed its way to $39.7 million in gross revenue, since launching on September 23rd, 2020.
According to data obtained by PG.biz (via Sensor Tower), the match-three game from Zynga has started strongly in its almost four months lifespan. Most notably, Puzzles Spells has already generated more revenue from player spending than Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, which released from Niantic – best known for Pokémon GO in June 2019.
Puzzles Spells has also earned 15 million lifetime installs, with the top country for downloads going to the US, followed by players in Russia and Germany. Similarly, the US ranked first for revenue too. These numbers arrive just as the game launches in South Korea.
Wizards Unite’s downloads, however, are still slightly higher overall at 19.6 million installs, with 14.8 million of that number originating from the game’s first month. Adding in the $12.3 million of revenue that was made during the same duration, it shows a significant drop in player interest.
In comparison, Puzzles Spells accumulated $6.2 million in revenue and 7.6 million installs in its first month. Sensor Tower noted that downloads peak in November but player spending has been consistently on the rise each month since September 2020.
Hogwarts Mystery
Jam City’s Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery continues to be the gold standard for the franchise, accumulating £271.2 million in revenue and 77.8 million downloads to-date. Launched globally in April 2018, the RPG mobile title conjured up $32.6 million and 20.5 million installs in its first 30 days.
Outside of this, the only other mobile-only Harry Potter games were Mastering Magic and Find Scabbers. Both games released before the App Store and Google Play existed and therefore no data was obtainable.
Taking this all into account, it will be interesting to see how well upcoming Warner Bros. and NetEase card RPG Harry Potter: Magic Awakened does with audiences in China once it launches.
PocketGamer.biz reached out to Zynga for comment regarding the figures, however, the firm declined to comment at this time.
Data showing the top Harry Potter mobile games by lifetime player spending.
We also spoke to Jam City’s Sarah Wolf on transitioning from lawyer to Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery game director as part of our Jobs in Games series.
