Here’s what I did to combat that: I went and rated a wholllle bunch of stuff. Like, a hundred or so things. Go find them and rate them. After you rate something, a screen will pop up and say “these are similar”. If you’ve seen and you like what pops up, rate it too, or rate it if you didn’t like it.
Then you will start getting a slew of recommendations and you won’t have to search for yourself in the whole wide word of Netflix. You will have things brought to your attention, a small number of things that you’re much more likely to appreciate.
That way, when you’ve got free time you’re not married to watching the one series you have. You can search (like apple + f, or whatever the windows equivalent is) your queue for “comedy” or “thriller” and so forth, so you can pick what you’re int he mood for.
Also, see our Instant Queue thread here. I just watched the Best of SNL commercial parodies last night. That was some funny stuff.
I actually feel less overwhelmed than in the old days of video stores. I don’t do too much instant because not that much stuff I want is on there. When I used to go to a video store, we had the problem of which one or at most 2 DVDs we wanted to see of what was available. With Netflix, every month or two I devote some time to adding a whole bunch of stuff to my queue (lots of TV series, which are easy) and then can forget it and just wait until the next DVD comes. With no late penalties, no stress. We lost access to our TV set for two weeks due to floor refinishing, but having some DVDs just sitting doesn’t matter. I’ve been watching my Have Gun Will Travel DVD, since that show was made for TV screens not that much bigger than the screen of my laptop anyway, but Mad Men will wait until I can set up the TV again.
I’ve had a few on my list since my senior year of college which would be, let’s see, 9 years.
Holy crap, I never really thought about that, wow.
I’d take them off, but I might want to watch them someday.
I’m more likely to freeze up over my to do list. I’ve been working on that. Turns out I have ADHD.
I’ve been doing that. I’ve also learned to take great comfort in the queue. My fear, you see, is that I’ll forget something. If it’s on the list, the list will remember. I do the same thing with my Amazon wishlist. If it’s on the list, I may or may not get to it, but I won’t forget.
It is a bit overwhelming but then I think back to the days of my youth (baby boomer flashback coming…run and hide…he’ll tell you about the brown acid at Woodstock) when there was only three channels, no home video and how the common complaint was “there is nothing on”. I’ll take today and the proven superiority of American capitalism.
My problem is that I’ll put something in my queue, and by the time it arrives I’m not interested in it anymore. It seems wasteful to send it back without watching, and I’ll tell myself I’ll watch it sooner or later, and it ends up sitting around for months.
That’s why I rip it onto the HTPC and send it back guilt free! That reminds me, I need to clear some space on the 1 TB drive, the [del]porn[/del] movie folder is getting full.
I like this thread because I couldn’t agree more. I don’t know if it is just my blu-ray player, but in the last couple of days, I can browse the selections straight from the remote instead of going online and adding them. That made the problem even worse.
But I know what you are saying. As soon as I start to watch one thing, in the back of my mind I am thinking of the whole universe of other options.