OCD?? Give me a break. She likes HP fic and wants to read it. Believe me, hundreds of thousands of literate fans go through this. It's not frigging OCD. It's absolute delight at discovering hundreds and hundreds of new stories about characters that one is fond of. It's called a literary interest. If we're going to pathologize a love of reading, then I don't know what!

LW, there's nothing wrong with what's happening to you. I've never been into HP (little boy wizards, *yawn*), but I had my own fascination of the exact same type, and went through the same thing. I was lucky in that my particular interest yielded a selection that wasn't anywhere near as big as the one you're wading through, but I had lots of fun too. Of course, I don't have a family to hide from, but honestly, if I did, I still wouldn't hide. It's just fic, after all. It's not like you're surfing for kiddie porn!

Just relax and enjoy yourself, and if you want to feel less guilty, just tell your family what you're up to. You'll get eye-rolling, laughs, and occasional teasing from then on. If that's not too tough for you to handle, go for it. After some time, your fascination will wear off (you'll find all the stories you like, or you'll wander away from HP)...or maybe not. I know many fans who are perfectly happy reading (and writing!) fanfic for years, regardless of age. (Many of the ones I know are quite a bit older than you.)

Reading is GOOD FOR YOU. Repeat that 25 times daily, and call me in the morning,

Andrew, I think it's a bit unfair to say that planners should have taken overdevelopment into consideration. I'm sure they did. But any calculation has its limits. The problem is the same fundamental one we've had for a long time, and which few people want to deal with - overpopulation - and unfortunately, it's a "delicate" question which the public had never wanted to address. (Mainly because the vast majority of people are not willing to give up the idea of making copies of themselves, just in order to relieve the stress on the planet.)

There's plenty of water. There just isn't enough water for how many people we've got sucking it up. We keep reproducing at explosive rates, OF COURSE the water (the land, the food...) will run out. What do people expect??

If environmentalists are really serious about earth changes, they're going to have to deal with this issue, because eventually it's going to eat the planet up like a big ol' chocolate covered cherry. Until I hear more "concerned" people speak up on this, the most fundamental of environmental issues, everything they say will be so much hot air.

Recently, I read a quote from a Hollywood screenwriter (wish I could remember who) to the effect that the reason so many adaptations are lousy is that it's almost impossible to make a good movie from a book. It's certainly impossible to film a book the way it's written, and that's the mistake most movie-goers make when they see an adaptation of a book they've read - they expect to see what was on the page. I wish there was some way to disabuse people of this ridiculous idea. I'm sure they'd enjoy the movies far more.

Now a short story, according to that writer, is the perfect form to adapt to a film. That's because when you adapt a book, you're forced to cut and cut and (if it's a long book) cut, but with a short story, you have to create to fill it out, and that makes a good film. Check it out. Rent some films that were adapted from short stories and see how much better they come out.

There's a book called Adaptations, an anthology of short stories that have been turned into films. When I read that book, I was quite enlightened, for all the stories in that book had been made into very good films, whereas most of the books I'd seen filmed had not come out well.

Oh, and I've heard that canard about Unbearable Lightness of Being before, and it stems from that silly idea that a book can be filmed literally. Hogwash, and especially for books like that, which are absolutely unfilmable the way they're written. Kaufmann did something that filmmakers often have to do, which was substitute imagery and feeling for words and thought. UBoL is a very cerebral novel, and those kinds of books are notoriously hellish to try and adapt. Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land has been rolling around Hollywood for at least 40 years for the same reason - nobody can think of a way to make a talking-head novel like that work. If you're waiting for a literal translation of UBoL, you'll be holding your breath for a hell of a long time.

Now, if you want to see a book truly massacred, go read E.B. White's Stuart Little. A sweet, gentle, quiet little tome (my own personal favorite book as a child), it was turned into a hyperactive, idiotic monstrosity of a movie. To this day, the thought of that thing makes me want to disembowel somebody. Now, that was a shitty adaptation!