{"id":25,"date":"2003-10-07T13:48:46","date_gmt":"2003-10-07T17:48:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wordpress\/2003\/10\/publicity_stunt\/"},"modified":"2003-10-07T13:48:46","modified_gmt":"2003-10-07T17:48:46","slug":"publicity_stunt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/2003\/10\/publicity_stunt\/","title":{"rendered":"Publicity Stunt?"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s looking more and more like the rock band Hell on Earth’s claim that they would feature a suicide of a terminally ill person at a concert and broadcast it over the Internet was a hoax.
\nThe only thing clear at this point is that the webcast of the a suicide did not take place, because the site was attacked and\/or overwhelmed by traffic<\/a>. (The site was reportedly being bombarded with 800 hits per second, which suggests a lot of people are comfortable watching that kind of thing.)
\nAs for the other details, there’s been conflicting reports<\/a> as to whether or not:<\/p>\n

there was an actual concert on Saturday;
\nthere was a suicide Saturday in conjunction with the concert; and
\nif there will be another concert next week, possibly including a suicide.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This confusion casts suspicion on the story. The entire episode smells of a ploy to generate media buzz.
\nBilly Tourtelot, the group’s leader, claimed that the suicide had been planned in accordance with the victim’s wishes to promote the cause of assisted suicide. A public spectacle like this would have done just the opposite. So hopefully this whole thing was just a bluff.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s looking more and more like the rock band Hell on Earth’s claim that they would feature a suicide of a terminally ill person at a concert and broadcast it over the Internet was a hoax. The only thing clear at this point is that the webcast of the a suicide did not take place, […]<\/p>\n<\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-25","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"h-entry","8":"hentry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}