telly trimming

The other night I surveyed my DVD shelves.

I discovered I have the following to watch:

18 Full anime series (meaning 20+episode long series)
16 Half anime series (meaning around 13 episode long series)
10 Anime films and OAV sets
21 Feature films
23 British TV series (normally 6 episodes)
27 American TV series (normally 20+ episodes)

If you do some simple maths and don't get hung up on details, that means I have at least 600 solid hours of stuff to watch. Or, to put it another way, if I were to spend 6 hours a day watching stuff (i.e. approximately a 'working day') it would take 100 solid days to get through it all.

Or, to keep with the working week thing, it would take approximately 6-months operating on a 9-to-5 Monday-to-Friday schedule to watch all of the DVDs I have on my shelves.

And that's just to watch the primary content. Part of the reason I buy TV show and film DVDs is because of extras. If you therefore say that for every hour of normal stuff there's half an hour of extras it could mean an extra 3 months just spent watching extras.

Also, I think that's a massive underestimate, because I'm mostly rounding down. Plus, if you include things like annual leave and Bank Holidays, I reckon it would take an entire working year to plough through my unwatched DVDs.

(Presumably in this fictional job I'm spending my free time reading books and manga :/.)

Or, to put things in a monetary vein, if you say each film cost an average of £10, a US/British TV series an average of £40, and that an anime series costs an average of £60 for a half series and £100 for a full series (this one is complicated because of the modern trend of releasing things in economical box sets, but most of my stuff isn't in said box sets) then that gives a monetary value of:

31 * £10 = £310
50 * £40 = £2000
60 * £60 = £3600
18 * £100 = £1800

That's approximately £8,000

I reckon I can probably average a return (meaning profit after all the fees and postage) of 25% on e-bay, so that means I could be sitting on about £2,000.

I wasn't intending to go on like that, but the basic point is I have tonnes of DVDs to watch and suddenly a couple of weeks ago loads of new shows I was interested in started on the TV.

As such, with the above situation brought into focus I've decided to stop watching some of them. (It also kinda puts my decision to subscribe to Crunchyroll into a whole knew light doesn't it? I mean, I've tonnes of stuff to watch, yet I'm subscribing (yes, that means paying) for even more stuff. I'm insane.)

The casualties include True Blood, Generation Kill and Flash Forward.

I have to say I'm a little bit regretful that I have to drop them, but with the backlog and all the other stuff that's on I just don't think I can justify spending the time they require to watch. Especially since none of them blew me away.

True Blood was probably the one I was most disappointed with. The main problem I had with it was the tone seemed to be all over the place. One minute it was kooky comedy, the next a veritable "bodice ripper" and then it would shift into high school type humour.

I dunno, it was like it was meant to be a parody that forgot it was a parody.

Generation Kill was, quite frankly, a bit dull and Flash Forward just felt like a low-rent Lost.

And speaking of lost, season 5 has just been sent to me.

Which is where I start to get annoyed with myself, because I bet I'll start marathoning Lost this evening and I'll probably have it finished by the end of the weekend.

That's annoying because if I can do it with Lost, why the hell don't I do it in a more general sense and plough though all these DVDs?

The answer is "because I'm an idiot," obviously.