I have nightmares in which I am buried under a pile of video games, Blu-ray discs and unread graphic novels, crying out for help, or at least a flashlight and an assortment of snacks. Actually, I don’t, but it would make for a much more dramatic beginning to this series of blog posts if I had, so let’s pretend.
The Pile Of Shame is not an actual pile, given that a lot of my yet-to-play games are digital and half the crap I want to watch is on Netflix. No, The Pile Of Shame is a concept, an irritating itch at the back of the brain that cries out to be scratched. The Pile Of Shame is a massive unchecked list of games, movies, TV shows, graphic novels, books, podcasts and gods only know what else which I’ve yet to suck in through my eye parts and tuck away in the “Awesome Shit” centre of my brain.
We all have a proverbial pile. For some folks it’s a fairly manageable heap. Perhaps a yearning to read the Times approved 100 great novels before they shuffle off this mortal coil. Well, I want to read all of those too and i’m fairly certain I’ve made it through a fair chunk, but I also want to work through the pile of Stephen King, John Connolly and James Patterson books I have yet to read, while working through an X-Files re-watch so I can finally get to season 10, plus there’s a heap of Lego games I’ve not yet maxed and I haven’t seen American Gods yet. My Pile Of Shame is more of a mound. A hill. A mountain of shame. Hell, I could carve faces of favourite characters into the side of it and call it Mount Shamemore.
I have over 100 titles in my Xbox One Ready To Install list, many of which I’ve never even glanced at. I have an Xbox Games Pass subscription with 100 titles which again contains a whole bunch of games i’ve not yet played, let alone completed and rinsed for achievements. Netflix and Amazon Prime are packed with movies and shows that I’ve yet to watch and I have a collection of roughly 700 DVDs and Blu-rays, some of which I’ve either never seen or haven’t watched in years and i’m now trying to find time to enjoy them again. As for books, the entire wall next to my bed is piled (I desperately need shelves) high with books and while I’ve read hundreds, there are hundreds more lying unread.
Fictional worlds mean a whole hell of a lot to me. I won’t bore you with the details but thanks to some health bullcrap, I don’t get out a lot. Suffice to say, I have a healthy respect for escapism. I do have occasional moments where I feel a little overwhelmed and just a tiny bit saddened by the amount of media that I want to consume, knowing full well that i’ll probably never be able to watch, read, listen to or play all of it before I eventually shed my physical being and move on to my second existence as a weird tapping noise that freaks people out at 3 am. There’s so much fantastic, joyous, entertaining art across so many mediums and I want to enjoy every last scrap of it, so I do my best to take in as much as possible, while still doing all that other stuff like raising kids and loving my wife and so on and so forth.
So, I come to the main reason for this post, the introduction of a series of other posts. I’ll soon be debuting a series of posts talking about all sorts of media under The Pile Of Shame heading. Essentially, these posts will be reviews of stuff that you might already have enjoyed, but that I have come to late or am returning to after years of shameful neglect. I’ve already scribbled a piece about a game that took me way to long to play, jotted down a couple things about films that I have finally seen and i’m hoping to soon start a series which i’ll no doubt rave/whine about before long. There will be up to date, useful reviews of current games and whatnot popping up on here, but this is just me, offering my opinions and you all commenting and telling me why i’m wrong. That’s how the internet works, right?