Ian Forrester tagged me with a meme last year in a post called My Media Consumption Diet. I found it today while doing some crazily excessive ego-searching to find something I thought I'd put up on the web a long time ago. I didn't find said things, but I did find Ian's post. I don't feel so bad since Improbulus tagged Ian three months before he noticed. I'll respond, but I can't think of who to tag - if you are reading this and you think it's interesting, feel free to just respond by posting on your blog and dropping the URL in your comments (that is, if I know you - this is not carte blanche permission to spam). 
So, what is my media consumption diet? Let's start with the easy ones.
Television shows over-the-air, that is through an antenna, cable or satellite: none. Can't remember the last time I even turned the box on. Maybe very occasionally I'll switch it on if I'm feeling really sick and want something to turn my mind off to (I also watched some of the US election night coverage on BBC One, and went to bed when it was looking like Barack Obama had won). I do watch a few hours of televison programmes each week, but the shows come from (ahem) other sources. I don't have to spell that out. You figure it out. As the Americans say: I plead the fifth.
All video content I watch is on my laptop. I think the sofa experience is vastly over-rated. HDTV is a waste-of-money at the moment. If I get HD content, I can watch it on my desktop computer screen quite happily. For everything else, I watch it on my small laptop (I hate the word 'netbook') which has a screen of 1024x600. This is more than large enough for me. I watch television primarily for entertainment - like Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death, I'm of the opinion that the problem with television is not when it tries to entertain but when it tries to be serious, because it turns serious things into entertainment.
Audio content, then. I listen to podcasts, but not as much as I would like. This is because I cannot find a compelling iPod+iTunes replacement for Linux (see Linux Switching Issues). I listen to a wide range of different podcasts, but I tend to find that now I am listening to more music - off my computer and off my phone. This includes podcasts from both the BBC, the Australian Broadcasting Company, NPR, NYT and other mainstream media companies, but a lot more independent podcasters.
On the Web, I use Google Reader and Twitter as my primary 'flows'. I'm also getting back into mail (thanks to mutt) and news (through slrn and individual.net). I spend about the same amount of time in Firefox as I do in a large number of shells, many of them hooked up to other machines through ssh, and those ssh sessions running screen so I can detach and reattach shells on different machines. Today, for instance, I plugged my laptop into my speakers, then started controlling it from my desktop machine over SSH, using mpg123 to play some audio. I then detached the screen session while the audio was playing, unplugged the speakers and plugged in some headphones, opened up Terminal on the laptop and reattached the screen shell, just in time for me to choose the next track. Also, with computers, I very rarely ever use virtual desktop features like OS X's Spaces feature. I have most apps open full-screen and primarily navigate through the keyboard and don't see much point. If I want to change applications or windows, I just alt-tab or cmd-tab through the various windows. On the Mac, if I've got shedloads of windows open, Exposé commands F9 and F10 are useful too.
For gaming, I have a PSP (which I rarely ever use) - I haven't cracked it or anything, but I haven't really got many games for it. Might get into this again to pass the time while on trains. I play EVE Online - currently, I've got it running on an iMac I use, but once I've bothered to reinstall Windows on my desktop machine, I'll run it on there. I'm thinking about upgrading my computer to have a newer graphics card - one that suppots Shader Model 3, specifically - so I can play the Premium Graphics version of EVE which is supposed to be quite pretty. I don't link my EVE identity with the rest of my online life, but my character is a Gallente pilot who mostly does high-sec mining, and uses the ISK from that to fund their habit of losing expensive ships in factional warfare. The total amount of time I spend on this is a maximum of about six hours a week - a bit more when I haven't got much work to do for university.
As for consoles? I've got a PlayStation 2 and a Dreamcast. Got no desire to buy anything newer. The Wii is pretty fun, sure, but I've got shit loads of PlayStation and PS2 games which are awesome, plus I play a fair few games on emulators. The nice thing about the Wii, I have to say, is that it isn't trying to be anything other than a console - the PS3 and Xbox 360 are both trying to be 'media centres' and 'centres of your digital life' and whatnot. Screw that. I've got a computer.
I don't go to the cinema at all. I used to go when I lived a few minutes walk from an independent arthouse cinema which charged about a fiver to watch some really interesting foreign and independent films, for a pretty low cost. I've pretty much weaned myself off the Hollywood cycle. I couldn't tell you what the current films are at the moment. The cinema experience is shit and that's the primary reason I don't go. First off, the price is a joke: my local Odeon, which is in a shitty industrial estate that wouldn't look a tremendous amount different if you dropped a nuclear bomb on it, charges £7 for a midweek evening showing (or £5.95 for students). Once you add refreshments on to that, it's cheaper to buy it on DVD or... well, you know. Every time I've been, I've been spammed with half an hour of adverts and trailers, and been surrounded by rude arseholes who spend the whole film loudly texting their idiotic friends and spilling cola everywhere. Pay a ridiculous amount of money to undergo an experience only marginally less enjoyable than the late train next to a bunch of drunken ASBO-wannabes.
My communications setup then. I use Gmail - both on the Web, and in mutt, with rsmtp and OfflineIMAP doing the synchronisation. I have tried GUI mail clients in the past, but find that mutt does everything I need, and does it a lot faster than the others. I have a J2ME client for Gmail on my phone too. The phone I use is a Sony-Ericsson W890i, and I use that on Orange pay-as-you-go. I get on the Internet with 3G over that using 'Orange World extras', which cost a pound per day for unlimited access. The nice thing is that, unlike contracts, there's nothing that can go wrong. If the service starts sucking, I just stop paying for it. You can't really cap it very easily - because if you fuck around with the connection, I just stop paying. My phone is unlocked too, meaning I can change providers just by switching the SIM. When I go to Paris next month, I'm planning on buying an Orange France SIM card to use for Internet access. I also have an alphanumeric pager, although I haven't figured out any clever way of using it yet. It does have the advantage of working in places where GSM signal doesn't penetrate. I have IM accounts on all the major international networks and use Pidgin and Adium. I also have a Facebook account, but, well, ugh - Facebook.
What have we left out? Photos. I don't take many, but those I do take are shot with a Pentax K100D or with my phone. The K100D is a nice camera - pretty sturdily built and with quite good image quality. I've got a few different lenses - the standard zoom, and some manual lenses that I can use with my 35mm Pentax MX. I've also got a Bronica ETRSi which is very awesome, but not exactly practical. I have a Flickr account, but it's no longer Pro. Generally what happens is that my Pro account lapses, then I take a whole ton of photos, and eventually cave in and renew the Pro account so I can upload them.
Books - does that count as 'media'? Sort of. I'm not reading much personally anymore, just a lot of books for my course. I don't really buy books - I borrow them from my university library. My fiction intake is currently approaching zero, although I want to make time to read some more novels. I'm thinking about perhaps trying to do a kind of separation thing where I read novels in bed and philosophy only when properly up.
I very occasionally flick through newspapers on the train, but can't really be bothered with them. Somehow I manage to stay reasonably fresh on current affairs, almost by osmosis. I find the twenty-four hour news cycle stuff to be pretty damn stupid. I want my news to be deeper, more rigourously checked out and analysed. I think the only way we can change a culture of soundbites, giant flashing headlines (Sky News have a giant board at Charing Cross Station in London that, when I last walked through there, had the words "JERSEY HOME POLICE PROBE LAUNCHED" or something like that. I'm guessing the home bit refers to a children home, but what are the police probing exactly? What's the point of this again? Why not get rid of all the flashy adverts and crap and acutally tell the story properly, otherwise what's the point? I defend, though, bloggers and Internet sources being snippy and concise - you can click on links if you are interested in finding out more.) I have an utter loating of newspaper opinion columns - they are filled with such stupid crap that I avoid them like the plague and even have a wiki page called Op-Ed Tropes.
I think that about sums up my media intake. And I'd like to apologise to Ian for it taking so long to get back to him.
