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The Lone Gunmen Are Not Dead
He Who Has No Name writes: It may have been one of Slashdot's most memorable front-page gaffes, but apparently there's no harm and no foul — because the Lone Gunmen are set to ride again in the X-Files return. Comicbook.com reports, "The Lone Gunmen, the X-Files' trio of conspiracy theorists, are set to appear in Fox's six-episode event. The three characters were played by Tom Braidwood, Dean Haglund, and Bruce Harwood. Haglund, who played the gunman 'Ringo,' confirmed his and his compatriots' return on Twitter today." We'll see how see how series creator Chris Carter handles their apparently greatly-exaggerated demise, and whether the explanation used in the print comics comes into play.
I think that the entertainment industry has found out that people don't care about spoilers or that spoiling just enough will actually drive viewership. The Simpsons has become pretty notorious for making advanced announcements of exactly what's going to happen and movie trailers have been giving away practically everything for a while now, but it doesn't seem to have hurt business. I've heard some people suggest that trailers that essentially give away the entire movie are more effective at attracting viewers than those which merely introduce the movie in a more broad manner, but I haven't read any studies to suggest that one approach is more effective than the other, but if it were detrimental to business I have a hard time believing that so many studios would be doing it.
Yeah. The world needs a lesson in faith from the military-industrial-entertainment complex. We should trust our elected leaders and the government more than we do the nutjobs who rant about our government spying on us or reading all our e-mail (really, what hard drive would be big enough to keep all that) or listening to our phone conversations. They've been gabbing on about that nonsense since the 60's, back when they hallucinated that the FBI was undertaking "counterintelligence" operations against enemies on US soil like Martin Luther King Jr and college students. All this baloney about drones and inter-bank rate fixing and whatnot -- when will they ever learn to let go of the paranoia and trust the people with whom the rest of us entrusted our votes?
I just read the link to the article back in 2002 and the real take home message was:
How the heck did Slashdot manage to get an article up fast enough to spoil the show within a 3 hour time window? I did a double take, did they spoil the previous week's episode after it had been discussed on every other site on the internet?
Was slashdot actually fast enough in the past that it published news rather than olds?