Thursday, August 21, 2008

Media crashing into "now"

The Evolution of Faye
I am a connoisseur of serial, archived media content.
For example, I download entire seasons of television programs from the interweb, and watch them when I want to.

One invariable side effect of this approach is your media crashing into "now". That is when your cozy backlog of new material to consume runs out, and you have to wait with every other schlep for the next episode to air.

Bit torrent is good and our friend, so as soon as there is an official airing anywhere in the world, I can has a copy. For example I can see Doctor Who months before it airs here in the states (I actually bought online and gave several of my friends important T-shirts months before the episode "Blink" aired, complete with weeping angels (the design is no longer available online, just text only or no text now!)

Yet still, you feel so mortal waiting for the next episode!

I also read web comics. I have RSS for most of mine, so they are easy to keep track of.

But I began reading Questionable Content a couple of weeks back. I hit "first" and just read through from the beginning since it's a good serial, and I had no hope of properly understanding the backstory without.. well.. reading it.

But now, 10 days and 1213 episodes later. *bam!* it's now-time! whaaanh! I ran out of QC!

I suppose the consolation is now I can make use of JJ's RSS Feed now. No more guessing and searching for where I left off last ;)

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

narbonic, questionable content, least I could Do, little dee, slock mercenary, erfworld, order of the stick,girl genius, megatokyo, diesel sweeties... if you haven't read those, they'll give you a few hours more of back story reading, lol.

Anonymous said...

I love QC, I've been reading for about 6 months and I love it. ^-^

I read Blip, Wasted Talent, Gunnerkrigg Court, Girls with Slingshots, Geist Panik, Girly and Kawaii Not, and of course, QC.

So far, my favorites are all the above. xD

Wasted Talent is pretty funny, the fabulous author just did a guest comic. :3 Same with Blip and GWS. All for teh lulz. ^-^

Aceman67 said...

Good thing QC updates 5 times a week. Been reading QC since comic 700. Took me 2 days to read the back log then.

If you want to read another good slice of life comic, check out Queen of Wands and its sequal, Punch an' pie. Damn good reads.

Jesse said...

8I Holy crap I get a lotta comments alla sudden! XD

Anonymous said...

Maybe because you got linked from Wasted Talent?

Jesse said...

wat, you mean jen linked to mah blog?

Confuseface. x3

Anonymous said...

*Jam
Wait, never mind, it was from a comment you left at http://www.wastedtalent.ca/comic/subtle-product-placement. False alarm!

I regularly read XKCD, Sluggy Freelance, MS Paint Adventures, and now Wasted Talent and was caught up with QC about a year ago but haven't come back yet, but I have sampled/binged many others (ErfWorld stands out) and have even more in my webcomics folder. I too am a great fan of completionist archive binging (bingeing? whinging? Whanging? Banging? Pinging. :P).

The solution I have to serial-crashing is just to find more: either another series to binge, and by the time you have binged a few others the original will have 'recovered' a bit, or read related content - some creative works (series', franchises, et cetera) have extensive fan art and fan projects attached, Homestuck and Firefly being good examples. That way you also get to meet cool people, making content consumption a bit more social where wanted.

Jesse said...

My solution have becomed Reddit. :D

I'm pretty sure it's not possible to run out of Reddit. x3