Interview with LOSTblog

I recently spoke with LOSTblog about Lost, the blog and other things. Go and read it (if you want.)

OMG LOST BLOGZ !

I’ve been a regular Lost viewer since around the summer of 2005. I caught the first few episodes as they aired over here in the UK and immediately sought out the entire season and caught up just in time to re-join the ABC viewing schedule in the autumn of 2005 for season two.

Over the long summer break I was desperate for information, hungry to know more. Leaving us with such a cliff-hanger was torture, and thus I took to the web as a form of information gathering. It was at this point that I realised the presence of Lost far out-stretched the TV screen. There was another place to enjoy the show. A whole other realm of entertainment.

Web sites cropped up in the form of the “official” Oceanic Airlines website and then later into season two with the Hanso Foundation. Web-logs, podcasts and other various websites formed around the show, with the primary intention of sharing new ideas, information and clues. Entire encyclopaedias were initiated to catalogue this information. And a community was born.

This is something special. Not every show demands this amount of attention and depth—and when I say “demands”, I don’t mean that too literally. Sure, a regular viewer can take in the show purely via the medium of television, but for those who want more, it’s here … and there’s a lot of it.

I have to emphasise just how special it is for such a community to support a show in such a way, since the show owes it’s existence largely to these types of community activities. The collating of material, capturing videos and sharing them on YouTube or via BitTorrent, the sharing of clues and information—this has been a large player in the show remaining on-air, since while ratings have progressively dropped, the show has gone on. When something happens on the show that the fans disagree with, it’s taken into account—for better or worse, the vocal fans of the show have a large part to play in the way the story is told. My point is, it’s largely unique. It’s precious. It’s something that is going to be looked back upon in years to come as a milestone of television.

Amongst the community, there is a fair share of high-quality providers of material. The people who spend their lives providing us with the things to read in the morning after the show. It’s a spectacular thing to witness … sometimes.

Now, I’d like to think I wasn’t the type of person who would judge people by typing errors or spelling mistakes, because in such an environment as outlined above, surely it’s the content that prevails. “Blogging” and podcasting is a medium of journalism in which people don’t expect the very highest of standards, and that is fine. I can accept it if I get an episode review just 30 minutes after it airs with a few mistakes. Or when there’s a summary of trivia on a Lostpedia article with things missing or in error, within an hour of the episode airing. The idea is, that it’s there, and that it’s built upon. I get that. That’s one thing, but the following—it’s just something else.

I’ve sat back and read the aforementioned materials since I started watching the show. I’ve took in the information, and if something bothered me, I’ve simply avoided it. I strongly believe in one being one’s own censor. An example of this is heavy spoiler material, something which I’d simply prefer not to read—and I can avoid this by not visiting those sites which provide such material.

But the Lost community contributor, ‘lyly ford‘ is simply unavoidable, and I’m not exaggerating. She’s the herpes of the Lost community. I’m sure that if you’re reading this awfully written post on such an obscure semi-Lost-related blog that you’re within the defined circle to have heard of ‘lyly ford’, and have read some of her … “work”.

For those that haven’t however, fear not—as I can provide (just a few of many) samples. The following quotes are copied in verbatim from their source, edited (slightly) only to remove possible spoilers (episode titles, mostly–which she throws out like confetti, even in post titles and on sites which forbid it).

two of our favorites lost characters are on the list; #3 Josh Holloway :) #19 Matthew Foxy

Source: http://lost-media.com/2009/02/22/tvs-50-hottest-hunks-ever/

Seriously, that was the entire body of the content. No mention as to what list (other than the subject of the post). Also, I’m not sure who the ‘our’ is in that sentence, and an IMDB search for ‘Matthew Foxy’ yields no results. Was he a guest star or something?

I’ve heard about it this week end but i wanted to wait ABC press release to confirm it, they’ll repeat epi [5×08] in 11th march but no new episode this day, seem there is a break of one week before to get a new episode of lost epi 5×09 called [title redacted]
We’ll have [5x08] repeat and a new episode of the show called “life on mars”

Source: http://lost-media.com/2009/02/23 — note: may contain episode titles and other spoilers.

Okay sure, maybe that’s how it was written in the ABC press release?

tv guide video with spoilers for the next episode and theory addressed too about aaron !

Source: http://www.docarzt.com main page.

Do you not get the feeling that you’re overhearing a conversation between two schoolgirls pushing prams in a shopping mall? (Or is that something that only happens over here?)

It goes on, and on … and on. The same copy-and-pasted junk smeared onto the main pages of all of the popular Lost blogs. The type of bullshit you expect to read on the ‘about me’ section of most MySpace profile pages (which I assume is where Ms. Ford began her endeavours into the world of journalism.) She’s almost like an AP or Reuters, but for the mentally challenged.

Ok, sure … like I said, “one’s own censor”; however the problem is that she’s unavoidable. It seems that wherever I turn, she’s there, vomiting at my RSS reader with her half-written drivel about this “hunk” or that “promo”. I find it hard to believe that she has access to such high-standard blogs, and is allowed to post uneditted. Why these bloggers allow her to contribute in the first place, is beyond me. She must either have really tight connections with ABC’s Lost department, or give one hell of a blow-job.

In the past 12 months I’ve seen the material from ‘lyly ford’ crop up slowly, from a few pieces on some forums and low-level blogs, to posting regularly on all of the major blogs, and becoming one of the most featured independent bloggers in the entire community, while other blogs with much more to offer in the realm of originality and creativity fall unheard of.

If there’s a lesson to be learnt here, it’s that if you want to be a hugely successful lost blogger, all you need to do is drop your punctuation, cover inane and ridiculous Lost-related topics and end each paragraph with a ’space’ and an exclamation mark. And if that’s too much for you, then I’ve set you up with an English to ‘lyly ford’ translation service to help you on your way.

OMG New Look!

I spent this evening finally getting stuck into some wordpress theme editing, and (if you’re reading this on the site) you’re seeing the result now!

There’ll probably be a few things I neglected to convert–in the deeper corners of wordpress–but for now, I’m happy with how it looks and even happier with how easy it was to modify the default wordpress theme. Right now it’s pretty tuned to Glass of Orange, in that the header links are static and hard-coded, and for that reason I won’t be placing the style on any public theme galleries.

Comment Spam and the Introduction of the Forums

After LOST received a bombardment of comment spam over the past few days, and so I have disabled comments (keeping them for the blog).

This meant that I could finally find a use for the PHPBB installation I had set-up, and so you can now talk with other readers on the Glass of Orange forums.

There isn’t much there right now–just a couple of categories–but it should be fine for now, at least.

C#: HTML Safe Entity Management

I’ve been working alot recently with parsing output from HTML or user-based content and I’ve often come across the need for a HTML safe-entity replacement tool and so constructed a simple class to deal with replacing the entities. The class uses the NameValueCollection and so requires the System.Collections.Specialized namespace, so don’t forget to import that if needed.

Since I wrote this (rather terrible system) I have been introduced to the HTML Agility Pack, which has a much cleaner approach to entitizing and de-entitizing (as they call it).

Suppose we have a string:

string s = "An ampersand (&) is a logogram  representing the conjunction word \"and\".";

We can entitize this by simply calling the static HtmlEntity method, Entitize:

using HtmlAgilityPack;
// ...
string entitized = HtmlEntity.Entitize(s, true, true);
// output: An ampersand (&) is a logogram  representing the conjunction word "and".

And to de-entitize the string, we would simple use the static HtmlEntity.DeEntitize method.

The HTML Agility Pack is a powerful set of tools for working with HTML documents in .NET, and is definitely worth further investigation.