Book ‘n Stuff

The navel gazing movie stats post made me think about the other thing I do that I have data for: Reading books! Back in 2013, I implemented an Emacs mode for keeping track of what books I had (because I’m the kind of reader that obsessively buys all the books from the authors I like, but I’m also really forgetful, so it just used to be so much work to buy books before implementing this system).

But when I had it, I got other things for free, like a database of when I bought and read books. So:

Huh, I wonder what happened in 2020… did anything in particular happen in 2020? Nah, can’t remember anything…

Oh, and that dip in 2016-2019 was because I started reading a lot more comics.

And I guess buying patterns are pretty related to reading patterns, but with some exceptions, like, what happened in 2022? Oh, yeah, I bought like 40 P G Wodehouse books (which I’m still plugging away at, chronologically — I’ve gotten to 1929, and I now know what a sticky wicket and a century are).

Er… what about books per month?

Yeah, October wins here, which isn’t surprising. Autumn is for reading.

Oh yeah, this is the “to be read” section of my bookshelves — books I’ve bought but haven’t read. Yet! (The books go on a Sedimentary Journey — the oldest ones are on the bottom, and every year I compact the shelves, and the books slowly settle down further and further down…)

It’s fun to have a solid selection of unread books — whenever I’m picking out something to read, there’s so many books I want to read Right Now. But having so many books to choose from can also be somewhat… I don’t want to say “stressful”, because it’s not, but there’s something… Anyway, this year I’ve started using a new methodology: When selecting a book to read, I limit myself to one of the “sections” in the bookshelf, and then next time, I do one from the next section, and so on. I’ve gotten all the way to the top now, and I’m starting over from the bottom again. Seems to be working — I’m reading books I’ve gone “eh, perhaps later” a million times now (like Stendhal’s The Red and The Black).

Anyway! Books, eh? Eh?

Movie Ratings “R” Us

I was vegetating on Xitter the other week, and I happened upon this tweet:

Which turns out to be a thing — there’s dozens of similar tweets over the years:

First of all, I think it’s amusing to call watching movies a “hobby”. But also the idea that if you don’t like all the movies you watch, you should stop watching movies? These people either only watch movies they are sure they’re going to like (i.e., they’re boring) or they like everything they watch (i.e., they have no taste).

But it made me think about my own movie viewing habits… which I started a blog for back in 2019, because I could never remember what I thought of movies. So it’d be nice to have a log of what movies I watch. On the web.

Here are the results:

That’s 725 films in total in five years, which isn’t too bad. (In addition to a few hundred from projects like Netflix 2019 on this blog, but I don’t have unified, easily accessible data from those posts.)

OK, perhaps it would be more useful to present a chart…

Hey, that’s more positive than I had expected — just a handful of ☐ ratings, and 30 ⚀ ratings. But I guess it’s pretty evenly divided between “good” and “bad”. I have a tendency to buy movies somewhat at random, and since movies (like everything else) tend to be bad, I expected more bad movies. But I guess I’m more careful when buying films than I thought.

On the other hand:

No Gnus T-Shirt Lottery Done

The shirts are all packed! And on time! Sort of!

My methodology here was M-x gnus-summary-sort-by-random (nice that somebody had added that), and then I went down from the top. If somebody had made a request that I couldn’t fill (for instance, if I was out of XL when I got down to them), I skipped them and went to the next one.

There were 29 contestants, and only 8 shirts, so most of you didn’t get a shirt. Sorry! And I guess you’ll find out if you got a shirt if it shows up in your mailbox during the next few weeks… (Or perhaps you can make a guess based on the extremely censored screenshot above.)

Oh, and I also had one copy of the Twenty Years of Septembe. I re-sorted and packed it up for the first matching entry, so one of you’re getting a shirt, but not a Gnus shirt.