Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot Asks: What Are Some Apps and Online Services You Use To Discover, Track and Evaluate Movies, TV Shows, Music and Books?
Earlier this week, news blog Engadget had a post in which the author outlined some of the apps that could help people keep track of TV shows, books, and music habits. A reader, who submitted the story, said the list was quite underwhelming. Curious to hear how Slashdot readers tackle these things.
I google "recommended books on <subject>". Then evaluate the responses carefully for bias, relevance to my needs, cluelessness, etc.
One of the best indicators of a show's quality to me has always been the number of people who are downloading/seeding the episodes on torrent trackers, as well as the number of teams that release torrents for that show.
Why would this require an app? Dang, y'all consume a LOT more media than I do. That's not healthy. Sheesh.
I do however recommend Common Sense Media as a way to discover and screen movie, TV shows, and games for children.
Rotten Tomatoes for the fan opinion.
IMDB for the movie studio propaganda.
The "critics" on RT are completely useless. In some cases, I suspect excessive corporate influence. In some cases they appear want to have it both ways- they right a reasonable review with pluses and minuses and then rate the film a "10".
The audience ratings are useful for now. I suspect some way will be found to corrupt them over time (bots perhaps?)
I also listen to youtube to discover new shows and movies.
I have minimal cable. It literally would be $78 without cable and it's $68 with cable. I actually tune to cable about.. hmm. once per 3-4 months? It's pretty sucky cable except I get a choice of HBO or Showtime. So I watch westworld and game of thrones and then I'm done.
Too many new shows are dystopic and dystopic puts me off.
Too many commercials on network television.
Lately I've been watching old tv shows on youtube. *Very* entertaining. Laugh out loud funny. Saw a very serious dramatic piece with *Milton Berle!!!*. Turns out he was nominated for an emmy for the performance.
But mostly, the TV stays tuned to Netflix. I'll drop into Amazon Prime for specific shows a couple times a year but their service constantly steers me to paid content which is a waste of my time since I will not pay $2 for a tv show and they don't tell me at the top it's a paid show or let me filter to "free only".
So most stuff I watch is on Youtube, then on Netflix.
Oh and i watch british stuff my friend checks out from the library.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
When they had actual numeric ratings, it was much easier to determine how bad a movie was (kind of like the moderation here.
Turds up or turds down would be ok, if they showed the count. Netflix does seem to have a reasonably good notification system via email or recommended for you categories.
For curating my collections, I have a couple different programs I use on different systems.
Kodi does a good job scraping shows, movies and music data.
Calibre does a good job with eBooks.
I was using a program called Shelves on my phone so I didn't buy copies of paper books I already owned.
For new releases of books or movies, social media will usually let you know when something of interest I also have some publishing houses that send me emails regarding new releases.