Yet another spoiler avoidance tip

[pegkerr]

fireriven warns:

I advise anyone who's looking forward to HP7 not to inspect their livejournal profiles for the duration. The trolls are no longer content to have subtle names for their journals, the better to lure you into checking them out and getting "spoiled" or spoiled. No, now they're just naming the troll-journals with the spoilers. So."

To turn off the option of receiving notices when someone friends you go to http://www.livejournal.com/manage/subscriptions/ and uncheck the appropriate box.

Comments

[cheshyre]

A day-and-a-half...
We only have to hold out another 40 hours or so...

[kiwiria.livejournal.com]

I'm counting the hours as well. This release is really bringing out the worst in people. I simply can't understand it.

[cheshyre]

It's their last chance -- the seventh book out of seven.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Well, I've had the jpeg images of all the pages sitting on my hard drive for a few days now, but I'm actually reading book 6, which I hadn't previously read. There are various reasons one might want to wait for the official release, or the hardcopy releast; that's up to each individual now.

(The image quality is lousy, it looks like a very inconvenient way to read a book even after adjusting the brightness to give some contrast...and the model name and serial number of the camera used to shoot it are in the EXIF info in each picture, so if the publisher wants to make a serious attempt to prosecute, it should be easy. Obviously, I grabbed it out of curiosity about issues other than the actual content of the book. And no, I haven't looked at the end.)

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

I know that I'm naive, perhaps, for wanting to have the experience that the author intended: that all over the world, we would be reading the story for the first time and experiencing it as a surprise together. Maybe it's because, since I'm an author, I give extra weight to authorial intention. I thought Rowling's intention was so extremely cool: the world coming together for one night, discovering the ending for this marvelous story, and nobody spoiling it for anyone else. That would be a remarkable world event, something never seen before. And we had waited so many years for this night to come! So yeah, I feel a little bitter toward those who are reading the story ahead of when Rowling intended, that they are cheating somehow.

But I don't feel nearly as bitter toward them as I do toward the people who blew the book open ahead of time and are trying to spoil it for everyone else.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Just heard a report that spam email with spoilers (or apparent spoilers, anyway) in the subject lines is going around, so people wanting to be paranoid might not want to look in their junk mail folders, either. And hope your spam filtering catches them and *puts* them in the junk mail folder!

I think there's a certain degree of feedback loop going on here; some people find the extreme anti-spoiler position sufficiently bizarre that it tips them over into actively trying to subvert it, and meanwhile the obvious attempts to deliberately spoil people make more and more people take at least some precautions against being spoiled, and talk nastily about those deliberately trying to spoil it.

Of course, all we have to do is release a huge mass of contradictory made-up spoilers big enough to bury the "real" ones in the noise, and it will mostly become irrelevant :-).

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

I think there's a certain degree of feedback loop going on here; some people find the extreme anti-spoiler position sufficiently bizarre that it tips them over into actively trying to subvert it, and meanwhile the obvious attempts to deliberately spoil people make more and more people take at least some precautions against being spoiled, and talk nastily about those deliberately trying to spoil it. I think you are absolutely right about this.

When I had the last book spoiled for me, three days before it came out, I was so angry. I was furious! I couldn't believe that a total stranger would be so spiteful as to try to ruin my experience of reading that book, and worse, to laugh at me for mourning the fact that they had done so. And it did alter the reading experience for me. I wanted desperately to be able to read that book as Rowling wanted it to be read, without knowing what would happen. I felt so cheated.

That is why I have been trying so hard to avoid spoilers. That is why I defriended someone--and exchanged some angry words--with someone who has been on my friends list for years who posted a scan of the book. I don't want to be cheated again this time around, and yeah, I really resent those who are making it easy to do.

But I don't know what I'd do if, when I go to the bookstore tonight to pick up my copy some yahoo out in the parking lot decides to yell out the ending of the book. I might be tempted to resort to violence, seriously. I plan to wear my iPod and have the music turned up Really Loud when I exit the store.