The Pre-List.

If you downloaded and opened the snapshot of “The List” included last time, one of the thoughts which might have crossed your head was to wonder how I even got to this point. “The List” is currently in a form which is admittedly not-so-simple, although I would suggest that it makes more sense than it seems (as we will see).

However, it wasn’t always like this. In fact, that snapshot depicts the third real iteration of “The List” (which I affectionately refer to as the Neo Master List). Let’s talk a little about how we got here, because that might help you to understand “The List” and what its purposes are.

It’s not easy for me to remember how it all began. My earliest memory on wanting to structure entertainment dates back to my high school years. I must have been 15 or 16 years old, and at the time I would watch all TV shows – animation or live action – the same way: start at Episode 1, Season 1, and binge. This would work for a while, but inevitably would lead to me getting bored with a show (consider also that I did not like skipping any episodes, even uninteresting filler episodes, which definitely made finishing Naruto a challenge). Naturally, the remedy for this was to change shows, and start bingeing on something else. The result? A scenario which many of you will be familiar with: juggling several shows at the same time, switching between them based on feeling, as I became saturated with one or the other.

One major issue I ran into frequently at the start was that I could not remember which episode (or, sometimes, even which season) I was last on in a show put on hold. Without any record of this, it was often that I had to skim through Wikipedia pages on lists of episodes, trying to read synopses without accidentally spotting any spoilers, just to try and track down which episode I was on (or even worse, opening up an episode based on a “feeling” that it was the last one I watched, and crossing my fingers). This problem had an easy fix, and it’s a fix which many people I know relied on before Netflix started keeping track for you: create and maintain a good old Notepad .txt file with the name of each show and the last episode you watched.

Notepad doesn’t get enough credit, by the way. My favourite tool on Windows.

I guess you could call this file Version 0.0 of “The List” (or, if you prefer, you could call it the Pre-List), considering that it was already a somewhat structured list of entertainment content. While it was very primitive and limited, there are aspects of the Pre-List which survived in successive versions of “The List“, such as the method of notation used to keep track of the different shows. An example of the Pre-List’s contents (although the actual Pre-List might have had as many as 8 shows at once) could be as follows:

• Pokémon (S01, Ep. 5/82);
• Breaking Bad (S03, Ep. 7/13);
• Cowboy Bebop (Ep. 18/26).

The Pre-List solved the issue of needing to keep track of where I was in each TV show. This saved me from exposure to a lot of spoilers, which was great in itself. However, there was another issue left unresolved, and which was causing me to switch between so many shows in the first place: saturation.

Watching too much of a show successively would still make me want to switch to another show. This is natural, but it put me in a position where I had to ask myself, many times: which one next? There might be as many as 7 other candidates to pick from at a time, with no clear criteria which might help me decide (The show I haven’t seen in the longest time? The show I am closest to finishing? Whatever my gut tells me?). There was a lot of time wasted thinking on this, a lot of shows which got left by the wayside (because, for one reason or another, I would never pick them as the next show) and, mostly, a lot of show-switching (because I might reconsider and want to change out of a show quickly after picking it up again).

In general, this was more chaotic than I would like. There had to be some method I could come up with which would make this more logical for me. And so, one day, I decided that I needed to come up with a solution which would fix two things:

1. Reduce the risk that I get saturated with a show I’m watching, by placing some sort of limit on the number of episodes to watch successively;
2. Create some sort of order in which to watch the shows on the Pre-List, to avoid losing time choosing and to commit to finishing all of them.

It all came to me pretty quickly, after deciding this. The result was what you could call the first real version (or Version 1.0) of “The List“. This version (which is the original List) not only continued to keep track of the point where I was in each show, but also defined points in which I would switch from one show to another, and defined an order for shows to be watched in.

Next time, I’ll go into more detail on this predecessor, which started to complexify my viewing experiences.

~SoniChaos

• Currently playing:
  • Dragon Ball FighterZ (Playstation 4)
  • Pokémon Sapphire Version (Game Boy Advance)
• Currently reading:
  • Tratado de Direito Civil Português – Parte Geral (I) – Tomo III – Pessoas, António Menezes Cordeiro
• Currently watching:
  • Fullmetal Alchemist (Ep. 3)
  • Boruto: Naruto Next Generations (Ep. 91)
  • One Piece (Ep. 867)
  • Attack on Titan (Season 3, Ep. 48)