Spoiler Alert.

This longform thought contains plot details that could dampen your experience with The Sixth Sense, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. If you haven't seen any of those (or read the latter two books), stop here.

My first encounter with "spoilers" - or details that could ruin someone's enjoyment of a book, film, video game and so on - was in 2002. I'd read on a film website that The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers would open with Gandalf the Grey fighting the Balrog he encountered in the mines in Fellowship of the Ring. Excited, I started my next shift at Starbucks and told my shift manager about it.

And he looked at me like he wanted to punch me in the face.

It turns out he was the type to run out of the movie theater when a preview for a movie he wanted to see came on. He told me never to talk to him again about movies.

Later that year, my friend Walt told me he never saw Fight Club because someone had ruined the ending for him. This astonished me. It's not as though someone had told him "Oh, in the end of (insert romantic comedy here), the guy gets the girl and they live happily ever after." It was a real shocker. Fight Club, Fincher's finale of hat-trick 1990's surprise-ending movies, had one of the craziest climaxes of any film I'd seen up until that point. His previous dark mysteries, The Game and Seven, were just as jaw-dropping when their end credits rolled, and at the top of a short list of movies I wish I could see again for the first time - along with The Usual Suspects and The Prestige, Christopher Nolan's 1900s-based suspense drama about rivaling magicians.

I remember in 2005 going with an ex-girlfriend to the midnight release of the sixth Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Information had leaked the day before that a main character would be killed in the book. Further, what page the murder would appear. Even further, this information had been broadcast across major news networks the entire day. So we get to the bookstore hours early and I'm with a girl in her mid-20s and we're surrounded by teenagers dressed as residents of Gryffindor and Slytherin, a head shorter than us. Midnight rolls around and everyone gets their copies of the book. Half the readers, ex included, sit down on the floor to start reading, while I look around pretending to admire the front window setups in various stores in the mall. Then I notice that out of the camped bookworms, many of them - again, ex included - have decided to turn to the page where _______ is killed by _______ and just read that page repeatedly...which seemed strange.

There was an episode of The Office in which Steve Carell referenced The Sixth Sense, and Dwight (Rainn Wilson) nods knowingly and says "I see dead people," one of the most recognizable movie quotes of the 1990s. As soon as he says it, Steve Carell scoffs and says "Thanks spoiler alert!" and tries to divert the cameraman's attention away from Dwight, who then blurts out "He was dead the whole time!" What makes it funny is that probably everyone watching The Office has seen The Sixth Sense, especially considering it came out 10 years before the episode in question.

With next July's release of the third Christopher Nolan / Christian Bale Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises, the anticipation has reached a fever pitch. I thought long and hard about what to look at and avoid and came to the decision that the details and media released on purpose will suit me just fine, so I've already downloaded the teaser poster (which is amazing) and looked at the picture of Tom Hardy as Bane that was released a month or two ago. When we go see the last Harry Potter movie this weekend, I won't run out of the theater when the teaser comes on. However, I'm avoiding the frequent headlines on movie sites like "How Badly Will Bane Hurt Batman? Info Leak!" I shouldn't have watched the fan-filmed youtube clip of one take being filmed of one shot outside a building with Christian Bale and another actor.

Ok, that's enough. Now for The Seven Evils of FaceBook.