As always, let’s start with the numbers.

Media consumed # (remaining/total)
Movies Watched 23 (126/159)
Books Read: 8 (107/152)
Comics Read: 122 (347/742)
Podcast Episodes Remaining: 179

WAIT A SECOND, THE TOTALS ALL WENT UP!  HOW THE HELL DID THIS HAPPEN?!

There’s a reasonable explanation for this and I did not break any of my rules because none of the items added to any of the overall totals were obtained by spending my own money.

In the case of comics, Professor Alan sent me four issues of Classics Illustrated.  I thought for a second that he was trying to derail my efforts here and then figured he was just being a really nice guy by giving me free books.  Then I realized that by having Stella give them to me, he was hoping to sew conflict between the two of us because he figured I’d take the bait and “shoot the messenger”.  Nice try, professor, but it didn’t work.  Hail Doom.

Two of the three books were late birthday presents.  I’ve read through one of them–a Crisis on Infinite Earths crossover omnibus–and the other one (a crime novel called Sunrise Highway) is next on my “to read” this.  The third was a book I checked out of the library because I need to read it for episode 98 of “In Country.”  In fact, there’s another book that I have to read for that episode that will arrive tomorrow.

The three movies added are actually not mine but are my son’s–he got them for his birthday a couple of weeks ago.  But they’re movies we’re both interested in watching, so I added them to the list.

My podcast pile jumped so much because I have downloaded every episode of the podcast “My Dad Wrote a Porno” and there are 100+ episodes of it.  They go pretty quick, though, so I think that by the end of August, this pile will be more manageable.

I’m consuming and making decisions on things faster than I can review them.  Granted, when it comes to the movies I’ve been watching, I’ve been able to stream them or rent the DVDs through Netflix, so I’m simply shrinking those lists and queues without having any of them actually in my house.  I’ve become a little more efficient with them as well because when you have the DVD account through Netflix and are on the full DVD queue website (i.e., actually on your computer and not on a tablet or phone), there are notations next to those movies in your queue and on your saved list (the movies that Netflix does not carry on DVD but perhaps might) that are currently available for streaming.  I made notes of all of them and streamed them this month; then, I noted a choice few that I was very interested in and searched both my HBO Go and Amazon Prime accounts for them.  So the queue is back down to 51 with the “saved” movies down to only seven.  Considering where I was at the beginning of the year, that’s a little bit of progress.

Those comics, though.  All the Image books didn’t take too long to read.  I made my way through all of the books in my current pull list that I’d let pile up for an incredibly long time, all of which were really quick reads.  I’ve got at least one “independents” post left to do and I really am happy to say that I am down to one whole longbox plus a small pile of unread comics, most of which by now are Marvel and DC.  I also did another reorganization of the comics that I was keeping and as a result, got rid of an entire (rather beat-up) longbox.  My goal, by the way, is to transfer my entire collection to shortboxes when I have brought the unread comics number down to a minimum.

I still feel like the comics are probably the priority here over the books, movies, and podcasts, mainly because I’ve invested so much in collecting comics during the past thirty years.  Plus, even though some of them don’t read very quickly–I’ve read a number of Roy Thomas-penned books that I have to take my time with–a lot of them are easy to get through in one sitting.  So if I’m able to get that comics number close to zero by December 31, that will be a pretty big accomplishment.

I think that’s about it for now.  Looking at everything I’ve read and watched over the last few weeks, it’s way more than I’ve reviewed, so I’m going to sit here and try to strategize what to write about and how to write it as well as start planning for when I go back to work next week and the afternoons of watching movies come to an end.