BeigeJournal

Anil Dash has a hilarious post about those people who obsess (and rant and rave) over not seeing or hearing any spoilers before “consuming the media product.”

I’ve never understood the spoiler thing. Did I watch just about every episode of the Highlander TV series after reading more than a week of intensive discussion on the Highlander mailing list (since the network I saw it on was the very last in the entire world to air each episode)? Yes. Did that bother me? No. I kind of liked it that way, actually.

There isn’t really a concept of spoilers in the non-fiction realm, that I’m aware of, anyway, and I probably carry that attitude over. I don’t actually watch many movies or read much fiction. I imagine that among people who read more than one book a week and attend more than two science fiction conventions a year my level of consumption of SF and fantasy media product is way over on the low side of the distribution. I’ve seen the first thee Star Wars movies. I watched almost all of Babylon 5. I’ve read, um, three Harry Potter novels. I got maybe one centimeter into The Lord of the Rings back in college, leaving only about six centimeters to go. Maybe I should watch the movies someday. I guess eventually I’ll give in and get one of them DVD thingies. They’re so cheap now that it would be just a minor extra on top of the price of the deluxe special collector’s edition LOTR DVD extravaganza.