Greetings! Welcome to The Wasteland, or indeed welcome back if you are a returning reader of my reviews.
The big news is, today, I am embracing a little tech and updating the way I post. From today, most reviews and commentaries will include a voice note / single person podcast, where the same review I would have given is a sound clip rather than written text. This is both to save me time, make it easier to do more than I have recently, and also to appeal more to you, and save you having to read a lot of text.
I hope this works as well as I imagine and doesn’t alienate the purists who liked the written word. If I can wrangle the tech, I may also attempt to translate the messages into text as well, so you have the best of both worlds. Watch this space to see if I can pull that off without a lot of hassle.
Below is a welcoming message of about 6 mins to serve as an intro to this new format and explain a bit more of what I have already said here. I hope my voice isn’t too offensive and that my accent is understandable to any non-english listeners.
As always, many thanks for dropping by, and enjoy The Wasteland. Intelligent comments and opinions are always welcome.
Run to the rescue with love and peace will follow – River Phoenix.
(quoted by Joaquin Phoenix when accepting his Oscar for Joker.
Full Transcript: (created using Gemini AI)
Hello, and welcome to The Wasteland. If you’ve visited before, then you’re familiar with what I’m doing, well, what I have been doing for the past 4 years, very slowly, trying to journalise my cultural intake, the films that I watch, the music that I listened to, the games that I play the TV shows that I enjoy. Or don’t enjoy. And over the years, there’s about 200 posts on the site at the moment that have taken the format of a picture that describes what I’m talking about, and then a couple of paragraphs or longer depending on how much I felt I had to say about something. How much I liked it. The longer ones tend to be if I really, really liked something.
I’ve integrated that into two rating systems for films and documentaries: the Decinemal system, which I invented, where 10 categories best describe everything good that can be in a movie ,I rated out of 10 to give you an overall score out of 100 and it’s quite spooky once you do that quite honestly with yourself and give everything a rating out of 10 – actors directors, the music, the design the X factor of something that you know isn’t highly regarded by the critics, but just has something extra, watchability is another category that’s in there.
Once you add all those together and get a score out of 100, it tends to be pretty close, usually to the IMDb score and IMDb website, which I revere and have been doing ever since its Inception many years ago now. Yeah, so they decimalize it into the score out of 10.
Anything over 8 is usually amazing, for TV shows. That score tends to be higher, and for movies, they tend to be lower, so something over 7, it’s probably very watchable on IMDb and it’s kind of the same for me, if it’s a movie with a Decinemal rating of 60 to 70 then it’s good, but not great, if it’s 70 to 80, then it’s pretty great, but still has some work to do and if it scores over 80, then it’s a masterpiece and is a must watch. That’s the criteria that I’ve been going with for a few years.
And with TV, and if I’m writing an album or anything else, I’ll just give it a standard rating out of 10. With point 5s or halfs included where it seems appropriate. That something is… It’s not quite an 8, but it’s definitely better than a 7, so I’ll give it to 7.5. So that’s the geeky way that I review everything.
Now I’ve been thinking about catching up on everything? I’ve got a list of currently, about 300 things that I have seen, listened to, played, etc. Over the last 4 years and I can never catch up because I can never find the time to sit and write a long essay about something so for a while I started doing microposts for things that I didn’t want to say too much about, but I wanted to give a rating to. I still found that doing those was taking up a lot of my time and energy. So what I’ve decided to do is because I eventually realised like a dummy that I could do. This is to turn each article into a one-man podcast voice recording whatever you want to call it and just speak, and tell you what I thought about certain things and then tell you the ratings at the end.
Etc et cetera, and you know you’re going to end up with a 5 to 10 minutes voice message that you can listen to on the go. Or at your leisure, without having to sit down and devote your time to reading.
So it’s good for me because I can save a lot of time by just recording my voice and it’s good for you. Because you can save a lot of time, you know, I think people find reading articles online quite boring and if they’re long they turn off half way through anyway, so at least with a podcast, you can hear my voice.
You can hear my emotions as I’m speaking, and it might be better. So, without further ado because these voice notes tend to get long as I ramble on about things. Around 5 minutes now. I’m gonna leave you there and just wish you all the best. In whatever creative and cultural project you are up to. And what movies and music and TV and games you’re enjoying. You can always leave me a message on The Wasteland. Its address is thewasteland.reviews, and it will remain that address for a while.
I believe, so that’s it, enjoy the wasteland feel free to delve back into the older typed up essays and reviews that I’ve done over the years, and hopefully I’ll be able to catch up with a good amount of reviews coming at you very fast. I hinted, maybe do 2 or 3 a day… we’ll see how that goes. I’ll probably end up doing one a week. You know how it goes, so enjoy The Wasteland, and thanks for listening.
Transcript Summary:
Journaling Cultural Intake
- Documenting personal cultural experiences, including movies, music, games, and TV shows.
- Using a unique rating system called the Decinemal system to evaluate films and documentaries.
- Sharing thoughts and opinions on various cultural media.
Rating Movies
- Rating movies out of 10 in different categories and adding them up gives a score close to IMDb.
- IMDb website is revered and has been used for many years.
- IMDb decimalizes the score out of 10.
Rating System for Movies and TV Shows
- Rating system for movies and TV shows based on IMDb score.
- Movies with a score of 60-70 are good but not great, 70-80 are pretty great but need improvement, and over 80 are masterpieces.
- TV shows and other content are rated out of 10 with half-point increments.
Introducing a New Podcast Format
- Creator shares their thoughts on various topics through microposts and ratings.
- To save time, they’ll now record one-person podcast episodes instead of writing long essays.
- These voice recordings will be 5-10 minutes long and can be listened to on the go.
The Wasteland: A Creative and Cultural Project
- Podcast format is better than reading articles online.
- Listeners can hear the speaker’s emotions and find it more engaging.
- The Wasteland is a creative and cultural project with reviews and essays.
Reviewing The Wasteland
- Discussing the frequency of reviews, aiming for two to three per day or possibly one per week.
- Encouraging the audience to enjoy The Wasteland.
- Expressing gratitude to the audience for listening.
The Wasteland 