Library Portal
For better or worse I am going to link to some websites that I already have a presence on. I still feel a bit conflicted about having put so much data about myself out there, and I am sure that the use of an alias is absolutely no obstacle to any of the powers that be, whether corporate or governmental. I'm sure that my father thinks it was incredibly ill-advised, because when I was growing up he was adamantly opposed to things like the government being able to get access to library records. And this is orders of magnitude worse. However, there is something I really like about the idea of sharing this kind of information with others and comparing and contrasting and reading opinions etc. And I guess I have just been banking on my relative anonymity as just another user to shield me.
Obviously as this labyrinth grows I would like to have a lot of my content here. But who knows whether I will ever abandon these other platforms or not. I am imagining the process here being a lot more organic. Basically, I mean that I will write about individual books and authors as they come up rather than having some massive catalogue. I imagine I will try to index the various pages in some ways though.
Books
I first got on goodreads in 2009. I quickly got hooked and because I wasn't working or in school then I obsessively entered every book I could remember having read, owned, or wanting to read. I really enjoyed that process. I also made "friends" with some people and got connected with some of the more active and interesting of the readers and reviewers on the site. But in line with my crazy mentality I developed some resentments and a little while after Amazon took over in 2013 I decided to try Library thing and largely abandoned goodreads. On Library Thing I didn't have quite the same gusto for entering all the books that I owned or had read etc. But around that time I started on the path of collecting game books, primarily chess books but also go books, and some books about other games. And a lot of those are represented. (All my physical books, and most of my e-books. I haven't catalogued all of my legally acquired RPG pdfs, nor most of my pirated digital chess books.) I have since partially returned to goodreads but haven't really "caught up" with my cataloguing. Overall, I wrote more reviews on goodreads and I like the way you have a feed of stuff from people you follow on the main page. I have learned a lot from that feed. But I like the recommendation features on Library thing better. And it feels more weird in the sense of being independently owned (although I seem to remember that Amazon owns a portion of it. He claims he will never give them majority ownership) and because it's interface is more complicated and less slick.
Movies
Obviously some of the same considerations apply here. I got on letterboxd at a time when I was kind of casting around and thought I might like to become a cinephile. I had the same kind of thrill of going through and cataloguing every movie I could remember watching. My main complaint with letterboxd and a reason that I stopped using it is because I use an ad blocker and at some point they got really obnoxious about having a pop-up asking you to disable it on every single page you click to. Perhaps I should just allow the ads but overall the cinephile thing didn't really work out and I don't really watch movies anymore or only rarely. So it's definitely not worth paying for and overall I just don't use the site much anymore. But here it is for what it's worth.
Video Games
Ditto the obsessive love of cataloguing and comparing and contrasting. These pages date from when I thought I might like to be a video games journalist or at least blogger so the reviews link to my blog. These pages are much more recent but on the other hand I haven't updated them this year as I have been busy with life stuff regarding the divorce and big move back to the US etc. There also wasn't a clear winner in terms of which site to prefer. One advantage here is that at least some of the process of inputting games is automated.
Music
I don't have a website where I have entered my music. I am unsure why because some sites do exist and I created accounts on some of them, but I just never got around to doing the same kind of cataloguing. So perhaps this will be the first to be native to this site.