Whittlin'

I am in no way any closer, by any true measurement, to having consumed the media the world provides me than I was around a year ago. If anything, I've further complicated life with a DS and 360, I've undoubtedly acquired more books and movies, begun work on more projects, found some other life in the world of live theatrical stuff that is its own fount of an enormous amount of things to see, and somehow I'm sure to have even gone and subscribed to more podcasts. There're a lot of podcasts. A lot. And I do have the senseless compulsion to need to listen to a show from it's creation, as opposed to from around the date I've discovered it. On some, I do keep up to date. Some have found a home as the soundtrack to certain kinds of activities. Others I almost never listen to, or just cherry pick occasionally, but I think they're neat to collect (re: 'classic radio'). Some have stopped being produced over a year ago, and I still enjoy new episodes regularly, and there are others that I haven't actually heard an episode that was produced after the date I subscribed, so extensive is the back library.

I catch a lucky break now and then, by noticing a) that in the past year or two I've never made time for a single episode of a given show, b) that I don't actually enjoy a given show, or c) that the host of the show has issued me an angry e-mail commanding me to never again listen to the program or any other endeavor in which he participates. In all of these cases, I can delete a lot of files at once. It's a feeling of false accomplishment.

With iTunes, I've ordered everything tagged 'podcast' by date. I figure this way, I'll get a nice pseudo-random mix of shows, and anyone referring to a current event or another show I'm listening to will all be on the same page. I've skipped some Museum of the Moving Image shows, which date back to 1989 (the date of recording, one presumes), because I haven't seen the films being discussed yet, but other than that, I'm progressing forward through the maelstrom, date by date.

I'm in February 2006.