Monday, March 29, 2010

Welcome to the Lost Marathon

For those that don't already know, my name is Peter Wilson and I am a 21 year old student that lives in Montreal, Canada. On May 18th, 2010, I am going to begin my attempt to earn the world record for watching all of the television series Lost in the shortest amount of time. What I mean by watching the series in the shortest amount of time is that immediately before the first episode begins I will begin timing myself and I will stop timing myself once I have finished watching the final episode of the series. This will include time the time I use sleep and eat. This will take me approximately five days, during which I will have to watch around 5500 minutes of Lost which comes out to about 91 hours, just under 4 days. Whilst I am watching Lost I will be video streaming my experiences on uStream and participating in a live chat. This will also allow the world record to be verified by the Universal Record Database (http://www.urdb.org).

Since I have announced my intention to perform this world record attempt, many have asked me why I'm going to do this. There are now many reasons for me to do this, but the reason that occurs to me as the most important is that I am doing it in promotion of the Child's Play Charity (http://www.childsplaycharity.org). Child's Play is a charity organization that raises money with the goal of buying toys for children who are sick in hospitals worldwide. Most, if not all of us know a young child who has had extensive medical care and we all know that long stays at a hospital are not pleasant. I believe that making their stay at these hospitals a much more pleasant experience is an idea that all of us can get behind. So please, amidst the excess and frivolity of watching 121 episodes of television, remember that donating a little for this cause is always an option.

On a less serious note, the original reason I considered doing this is to, in a way, honor a series which I have been following for years. Since the beginning of the show, it's showrunners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse have emphasized the fact that Lost is a story with a beginning, middle and end. Lost is a pretty epic achievement in serialized storytelling and I think it would be thrilling to be amongst the first to experience what the series feels like as a cohesive story. Also, the glory of watching it in world record time doesn't hurt either.

I have work to do,

Peter Wilson
March 29th, 2010