For the last few months, I’ve been generally avoiding Lost spoilers. More recently, I’ve been shunning pretty much all TV spoilers because a few times I was reading spoilers for other shows I caught tantalizing glimpses of Lost spoilers and it was wrecking my chance of going into next season relatively clear of spoilers. And then, today as I was scrolling through TV news over at TV Squad I came across a post describing a casting announcement for Lost that is more than your typical announcement.

I won’t describe it here, but it’s something that Lost fans will get pretty riled up about. In fact, I would have loved to go into the new season next year without knowing about it at all. I miss those days of shock and revelation from the first couple seasons. with each new year my love of Lost grew so each new year I sought out more and more spoilers to satiate my desires. But this year I wanted none of it. As tantalizing and pleasing as those spoilers were in earlier years, they ultimately took away some of the pleasure from the show itself.

And that’s exactly why I wanted to go into next season completely unaware of any of the coming twists. Up until now, I had done that (excluding one major spoiler about the premiere which I curse ever having read no matter how accidental) and this casting announcement once again opens up the floodgates.

But I’ll continue my abstinence, at least until we get closer and spoilers are unavoidable, and maybe it’ll be worth it. Stay tuned, fellow Lostophiles.

I’ve spent a fair bit of time on various mailing lists recently, mostly dealing with the development of new software and programming languages, and I’ve come across the most annoying thing ever.

[snip]

> Quoted section of previous e-mail

Quick comment on single aspect of previous e-mail which I've quoted above.

[snip]

We all get that you’re quoting him and that, because you’re quoting a small section of a larger e-mail, we may need to read more of the previous email to understand your comment in context, but that’s why any self-respecting email client supports threading of related e-mails, especially when under the purview of mailing lists.

If we really want to, all we have to do is scroll up a bit and we’ll get the previous posts in the thread. Also, if we’re reading a posting on a mailing list, I think it’s safe to assume that we’ve been reading along and are aware of the context of the discussion.

So please stop snipping. When there are more snips than there are useful contributions to the discussion, you have a problem.