Cutting Back

I've recently cut down the number of podcasts I listen to. I won't say what I cut and why because that's really not the point of this post. I'm down to six regularly-updating and four infrequently-updating ones. I a lot of this had to do with the fact that I had started organizing my day by how many podcasts I had to listen to: I didn't want to do certain things because they weren't "podcast-compatible," which is a fairly stupid notion. I need to read more books, and playing BioShock 2 again for the singular reason of "I can do it while listening to podcasts" instead of reading can't be a good thing.

But it's also because I've realized that the number of people who's opinion I care about has steadily dwindled. The trigger that started my podcast genocide was that I was listening to too many podcasts thinking, "I don't care what these people have to say." And when that's the case, I started deleting them. Keep in mind that it isn't because they have different viewpoints; that's actually something I value. But some people I've just found boring, which is why I got rid of them. It's not worth my time, which is something I should've realized a long time ago.

And it's funny, because that follows the same trend that other media has. I only visit 2-3 game websites regularly anymore, and one of them is mainly for news. I think it has to do with "my" generation of game journalists mostly having moved on to do developer work. A lot of the newer faces are unfamiliar, so it's harder for me to get attached. Which might be a bad thing, since I'm looking to be one of those new faces. And since I'm insulating myself within the few sites I do visit, this whole thing leads to a downward spiral where I'm not exposing myself to new points of view.

But with my work at Bitmob, I like to believe I'm getting to know the new faces before they're actually faces. So maybe I am getting my exposure.