15 February 2008

Media diet week 7

Press: no Press Gazette this week, grrr! It's supposed to plop through my letterbox on Thursday. Occasionally it arrives on a Friday instead. So I was not pleased when the postie didn't bring it this morning (although I did get another, tiny, win on my premium bonds so I don't totally hate Royal Mail). PG had better arrive tomorrow. Or else. I'll catch up on the internet otherwise. But it won't be the same. I picked up a copy of Dare last Sunday while in Superdrug - it's their freebie mag. Have only had a brief flick through but it looks ok. Not sure I'd read it regularly though, it seems aimed at people at least 20 years younger than me. Surely not all Superdrug's customers are fashion victim 20-somethings?

Blogs: Sally at Getting Ink launched Getting Ink Requests, which I mentioned earlier in the week. But I'm happy to plug it again because it deserves it. And has already spawned an imitator over at Journalism.co.uk. Dave Lee, the nation's most famous student blogger, also blogged about Sally's experiment and caused a small furore.

TV/radio: I still miss Pandora. I'm struggling with Last.FM. Inputting favourite artists was so easy on Pandora but seems really difficult on Last.FM, which is neither intuitive nor user-friendly for the over 25s. And it keeps banging on about scrobbling, which sounds extremely painful but is apparently something to do with selecting music based on what you play on your PC. I hate the assumption that you have an MP3 player of some sort. I don't and am unlikely to ever get one, so scrobbling is lost on me. Sanity was restored with TV - EastEnders has been reasonably good this week, Torchwood is at last really developing the characters (especially Ianto), Mistresses had a rubbish ending but satisfied my need for some trash telly and, er, that's it. I don't watch a lot.

Books: I've read very little this week. I'm about 30 pages into Playing Away by Adele Parks, a ghastly chick-lit novel that came as a free cover mount on January's Eve and has failed to engage me so far. I'd throw it in the bin but I was brought up to revere books, so I'll give it to the charity shop instead. John Barrowman was on Front Row on Radio 4 this week, talking about his autobiography - normally, I'm too tight to shell out for hardbacks and am happy to wait for the paperback, but after listening to him talk about the writing of Anything Goes, I decided I couldn't wait. I ordered it from Amazon and it arrives Monday. So that's next week's book sorted.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Re: LastFM and scrobbling... really worth doing, in my opinion. You download a plugin for iTunes or Windows Media Player or Winamp or whatever you use, and it logs whatever you listen to.

I wasn't sure at first... but the recommendations are really good. There's a nifty Facebook app for it too, I believe.

Thanks for the link. :-)

Anne Brooke said...

Ah, Ianto - he's so great! All those lovely one-liners and nobody notices him. Sigh ...

And must admit to being really, really irritated by Adele Parks books - they seem to make shallow into an art form.

==:O

A
xxx

Unknown said...

Dave, thanks for the advice. There's only one problem - I don't listen to music on my PC, not in the sense of downloads anyway. I very occasionally bung a CD into my DVD drive, but I don't copy the tracks over on to my hard drive. If I want music, I usually put Radio 2 on, using BBC Player. Otherwise I'm a Radio 4 girl. The great thing about Pandora was that I could input all my favourite artists (pathetically, my station was called Ah Nostalgia). Last.FM definitely seems designed for iPodders. I'm starting to feel old...

Anne, Ianto was woefully underused in Season 1. Very few lines and not much presence so it's great to see the scripties making better use of him now. I've really been enjoying his one-liners. Especially in the episode with the soldier and then the one about the alien meat. Adele has been banished to my hospice shop for recycling and I'm going to start Electricity by Ray Robinson tonight.