Wednesday 28 May 2008

Welcome to My Cultural Experience!

The aim of this blog is simple: as the title may suggest, it is a catalogue of my cultural experience. But what does this actually mean?

Well, by "cultural experience" I mean the things most of us are exposed to every day: the things we read, we listen to, we watch on TV, and so on. This covers a massive range of things, obviously, and it would probably consume all of my time if I were to attempt to list it all. So, in practice, this blog will be slightly less ambitious. I will aim to catalogue primary cultural experiences -- effectively, list TV shows, films, music, radio programmes, games, books and magazines I watch/listen to/play/read -- which may sound totally meritless to anyone but me. However, when I have the desire to express an opinion on any of these, I will. And if I wish to write about anything else culturally relevant -- a particular article, perhaps, or an advert -- then this is a forum for doing so.

As well as being a chance to espouse my thoughts on almost anything I fancy (the point of many blogs, I'm sure), it gives readers (should I find any...) a chance to also comment on things, be it in reaction to a longer piece I've written or just to something that's popped up on one of my lists. As such, comments are heartily encouraged, though I suspect I'll be lucky if I find any readers.

On the more technical side of things, updates will be anywhere from daily to... well, less frequently. I watch some TV every day, watch movies somewhat regularly, and follow a fair degree of news that could lead to some extra commentary there. I won't be attempting to catalogue every news article / review / etc I read, nor will my TV list be truly extensive -- if I happen to catch 10 minutes of the news it won't make the list, for example, but if for some reason I felt compelled to waste my life watching an episode of EastEnders I'd admit to it. By a similar token, the music list won't go through every single song I happen to hear every day, but will list any notable events -- e.g. if I listen to a particular album, or a particular selection of songs, or, as with articles/adverts/etc, if I want to comment on a particular song for some reason. And as for games, if you haven't guessed yet... well, I'm not going to be mentioning every minute I waste on Tetris and the like! If I'm not reviewing something, or if I intend to review it sometime later, I'll try to link the post to a relevant site -- for example, the standard IMDb for films, or a TV series' official site (or more likely TV.com), and so forth. All viewings/listenings/readings should be assumed to be my first unless otherwise noted, in which case I'll do my best to give a number, though obviously that's not always possible.

Hopefully that covers what I intend to do here. How long it'll last, I don't know. I've attempted a variety of blogs in the past -- most of them here on Blogger. Some have lasted no more than an introductory post, others are running strong after 17 months with no signs of letting up, even if they're now hosted elsewhere. Speaking of which, please check out my blog, 100 Films in a Year. Hopefully the title is to some degree self explanatory, and that blog's existence will also explain a probable shortage of specific film reviews here (though any posted there will be linked to).