So one of the main things I used to write blogs about in my teen years and into the first year of college was movies and tv. On Livejournal it tended to be more stream of consciousness live tweeting before twitter was big. So I’d have a ‘new entry’ page open while I watched and just typed my thoughts as I went, maybe summed up thoughts as soon as the show was over, and if there were more than one show a night I was watching (I think max I had 12 shows I was watching? At one particular moment I had 7 Monday night shows and some were on at the same time so it was a fuss to watch them before I was spoiled. In college my professional blog was more of a movie blog because with the odd class times I had, I could go off to a theater to watch a movie between classes. Which was great fun for a semester when movies were only $10. And then I’d try to be as objective and professional as possible.
That didn’t work out so well, because eventually the lifelessness of the stodgy blog got to me and I stopped updating. But something I’d picked up for Livejournal was the “yearly challenge” idea of watching 100 Movies in a year, or reading 50 books, etc. I didn’t really enjoy rewatching/replaying/rereading things when there were so many other NEW things to discover out there. And also going back to things changes how you feel about it and I like the way nostalgia colors memories based on who I was when I experienced it the first time. (Someone come discuss with me how that doesn’t really apply to music though…)
Anyway, of all the things I’ve picked up over the years from the internet (*sweats*), media goals have stuck with me. At one point I even made a point of getting through my entire backlog of Netflix movies during what I called ‘March Movie Madness’ where I’d try to watch at least one movie off my queue a day. And that worked for a while! But now Netflix has too many things I want to watch, and series too, and the list feature has been broken for a very long time on desktops.
Plus the 30s curse of getting into exercise and healthy lifestyles that I expected to fall into turned out to be a Gen X thing, and the curse that has befallen the millennial is actually… productivity. And for the most part I’ve seen people trying to get travel plans and life goal dreams sorted out, maybe some career aspiration, but very rarely media goals. So I guess it’s rare to think of sitting on the couch watching TV as productive, but really, nothing really connects us to other people quite like media, and art as a whole, does. Before this year the ‘water cooler conversation’ was about tv we were watching, or the last blockbuster that came out. If you were a gamer, countdowns to midnight releases mirrored what Harry Potter fans did in their teens, and fans of Star Wars and other franchises camped out at theaters to watch the very first showing at midnight.
You could boil that down to art is important, but also, to me, modern TV is like a good book. And I’m all backlogged on books I need to get through, too. And everyone has, or could have, a list of movies that they’re ashamed to have never seen. And in the gaming community sites like backloggery and grouvee and even howlongtobeat.com help you sort out all those story-driven games you always said you would get through, and didn’t.
All that to say that my media goals are a means to an end, to stay knowledgable about pop culture without the trash. A lot of the shows or games on my list are old, and coming to them later in life shows their age, the way they are products of a time gone by, etc. But they are a part of my list, and I will get to them!
