Media Diet: Elder Scrolls, Cinematics, balance
Part of the reason that I'm not buying a new computer yet is Oblivion: a game guaranteed to prompt extremely poor time-management decisions from me. Betheseda's last big-budget RPG, Morrowind, also sucked my brain in for a good long while. I'm not entirely sure why this is - I've been drifting further and further away from anything like a computer gaming habit for a while now. There are a lot of games out there whose ideas I kind of like, but none of them seem compelling.
This is a lot like what's happened with movies, only movies have an even lower bar to entry than computer games. They have the same dynamic, though, where there's a fair number that seem intriguing but nothing compelling. I can't remember the last time money went from my pocket to a movie theater's till. It also doesn't help that they've been treating their customers worse and worse in addition to raising prices ahead of inflation.
I have to wonder about the healthiness of my media diet in light of this. I osmose a lot from my social circle - yay for chatty film students like the Emergency Russian - but it bugs me to think that I'm getting further and further from the cultural mainstream. That's not inherently a good thing, no matter how much I dislike a lot of the cultural mainstream. It makes it harder to find common ground with people. I don't watch TV. I've never seen Buffy, BSG, The Simpsons, Futurama, or The Wire. I don't listen to commercial radio. I read the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle pretty regularly, but I probably wouldn't notice if you took the rest of the paper away.
So what's left in my media diet is pretty much The Internet. P-Zed, Twisty, Digby, David Neiwert, the S,N! crew, Tom Tomorrow, and Johnathan Schwarz are my news shows; LJ, Wikipedia, and the coruncopia of stumbled-upon sites are my radio talk shows, and Order of the Stick, Schlock Mercenary, Wondermark, Penny Arcade, and Something Positive are the comics page. There's a lot of stuff besides - I mean, we're talking about the Internets - but those are what I head for when nothing seems to be coming to mind.
This works, but I still have to wonder what kind of reality tunnel it's forming. I can't quite see the shape of it. I can tell that leaning on the WSJ, Fox News, and Jay Leno will mold a certain kind of worldview. A person's media diet has an effect. I make my media diet high-liberalism, low-advertisement, and high-joy, then hope that it's all adding up to high-sanity because it sure as hell isn't adding up to high-certainty.
This is a lot like what's happened with movies, only movies have an even lower bar to entry than computer games. They have the same dynamic, though, where there's a fair number that seem intriguing but nothing compelling. I can't remember the last time money went from my pocket to a movie theater's till. It also doesn't help that they've been treating their customers worse and worse in addition to raising prices ahead of inflation.
I have to wonder about the healthiness of my media diet in light of this. I osmose a lot from my social circle - yay for chatty film students like the Emergency Russian - but it bugs me to think that I'm getting further and further from the cultural mainstream. That's not inherently a good thing, no matter how much I dislike a lot of the cultural mainstream. It makes it harder to find common ground with people. I don't watch TV. I've never seen Buffy, BSG, The Simpsons, Futurama, or The Wire. I don't listen to commercial radio. I read the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle pretty regularly, but I probably wouldn't notice if you took the rest of the paper away.
So what's left in my media diet is pretty much The Internet. P-Zed, Twisty, Digby, David Neiwert, the S,N! crew, Tom Tomorrow, and Johnathan Schwarz are my news shows; LJ, Wikipedia, and the coruncopia of stumbled-upon sites are my radio talk shows, and Order of the Stick, Schlock Mercenary, Wondermark, Penny Arcade, and Something Positive are the comics page. There's a lot of stuff besides - I mean, we're talking about the Internets - but those are what I head for when nothing seems to be coming to mind.
This works, but I still have to wonder what kind of reality tunnel it's forming. I can't quite see the shape of it. I can tell that leaning on the WSJ, Fox News, and Jay Leno will mold a certain kind of worldview. A person's media diet has an effect. I make my media diet high-liberalism, low-advertisement, and high-joy, then hope that it's all adding up to high-sanity because it sure as hell isn't adding up to high-certainty.