What am I listening to these days?  Not as much as I used to.  At work I still have to use headphones, and I don't bother that often, so that playlist has slowed to a crawl.  Even at home, though, since we moved, I feel inhibited from playing my music out loud too late at night, because Simon's bedroom is in the basement with me; less so in the summer, and now that he's getting into high school, but still.  Also, some of the games I play have their own incidental music, and while I often turn it off to listen to my own tunes, sometimes I don't.  Plus, more watching TV on the computer.

I'm still using Winamp on the computer (though from time to time I consider writing my own personal media player program, which would be optimized for the tasks that I want, but I haven't even considered how to begin yet), and I have a number of playlists, most of them themed (such as Female Artists, or music I acquired in the past year, or Canadian Artists, or whatever else I can come up with), including my long-term effort to listen to my entire library of songs in alphabetical order (started in 2009; almost done the M's).  However, I'm also acquiring music at my usual rate--90 tracks a month from eMusic, plus occasionally buying other stuff from iTunes or other sources, or acquiring free downloads from various sources.

What I had been doing was doing one screenful (35 tracks, generally) from my alphabetical ordering, then one from another playlist (cycling through in sequence).  But when my "New" playlist started piling up, I made it come up more often like Alphabetical-New-Alphabetical-Other, or Alphabetical-New-Other.  And recently I've been falling behind enough that it's just been Alphabetical-New-Alphabetical-New, with no time for any of my other playlists.  Maybe that 90-tracks-a-month thing is a little excessive, but I got grandfathered into it at a very good rate years ago and I feel like I should keep up with it.  Probably classic Sunk Costs Fallacy there, eh?  At least it keeps me from buying much on iTunes.  I do still get CDs from the library, once in a while, but I've started just ripping them and leaving them sitting around until I can try them out...which can be months.  Forget about trying to keep up on what's current--I haven't done that for years and years anyway.  (How long ago?  Does the word "Tubthumping" mean anything to you?)

More consistently, I tend to listen to my "favourite songs" playlist, various ordered, while I'm driving to and from work (or anywhere else alone in the car), or while I'm doing the big dishwashing push on the weekend.  My "favourite songs" list is up over a thousand songs right now, so close to 1/40 of my entire collection; these are the ones I can easily sing along to, or would like to be able to.  It amuses me to come up with different ways of sorting it--alphabetical by title, alphabetical by reversed title, increasing order of length, etc.  Currently I'm listening in decreasing order of song length, which is interesting, though I anticipate a lot of Beatles and They Might Be Giants as I get down below three minutes.  (Next up, sorted in order of the anagrammed form of the title...)  In between the complete scrambled list, I tend to pick a shortlist, plus any new songs I want to audition, and do them in a plain scramble.

I've also become a fan of the "Welcome To Night Vale" podcast, as so many others have before and since.  It's gone up and down in quality, some of that no doubt happening around the time I caught up and had to start waiting for new episodes.  The recent resolution of the Strexcorp plotline was pretty good, though.  I've started only listening when I've got a couple of episodes accumulated, so I haven't listened past that yet; Simon and I did go to see the live performance when it came through town, though.

What have I been buying recently?  I started tracking down artists featured in the "Weather" section of "Welcome To Night Vale", and downloaded a bunch of their albums (a lot of them were on eMusic, which makes sense because eMusic focuses on indie artists, and so does WtNV), including Eliza Rickman, who was at the live show.  I used to avoid albums with lots of tracks, but now I appreciate them because they help me burn through my monthly allotment faster, so recently I downloaded the extended version of [The London] Suede's debut album (most of the bonus tracks were a bit too noisy for me, but I did like their cover of "Brass In Pocket"), and Davíd Garza's sprawling "box set" "A Strange Mess of Flowers".  (If you're really curious about what I listen to, of course, you can check me out on last.fm.)

I've been debating getting the new Weird Al album on iTunes; I watched all of his videos, and I confess that the only one that really won me over as a song was "First World Problems".  Normally I like his single-artist pastiches, even though I was never a big fan of the Pixies (as he is apparently paying tribute to with this one).  His straight song parodies never did as much for me, and even less so these days when I've rarely even heard the song he's spoofing.  I had heard "Blurred Lines", but "Word Crimes" unfortunately runs afoul of my preference for descriptive over prescriptive grammar.  I'll probably get the album eventually--after all, I have all his others--but I'm not sure when I'll get around to it.  (I haven't bought the last TMBG album, "Nanobots", yet either, partly because I kept waiting for it to show up on eMusic, where most of their albums are available, and partly because I never got around to actually listening to any of the songs from it.  Again, probably one of these days.)

I've been a big reader for many years, but my reading pace has slowed down a lot in the last couple of years.  Two or three years ago I managed to do a Goodreads challenge where I read 100 books in the year, partly in response to the year before that where I'd spent three entire weeks slogging my way through Steven Erikson's Toll The Hounds.  I managed it, yes, but it was little grueling, forcing myself to a hard page quota so I could spend no more then three days on a book.  Mostly fiction, neglecting the nonfiction I also enjoy, and tending to also avoid thicker books that would take longer.  After that I slacked off more--and started reading longer books again--so the goals have gotten harder to attain.  I've also been doing more rereading, and since I imported large chunks of my reading history into Goodreads it's harder for it to count those.  (If you want up-to-the-day, or at least week, updates on what I'm reading, you can always follow me on Goodreads...)

For fiction, I recently finished Guy Gavriel Kay's River of Stars, last of the Aurora Award nominees for the year; I may actually vote this year, though I haven't decided for sure yet.  I'm a little disillusioned with awards right now--why, I won't even nominate my friends' books any more.  I've been rereading David Gerrold's War Against The Chtorr, and recently continued into a reread of his Dingilliad series with Jumping Off The Planet; it's not clear to me if it's really a related series, despite some overlapping references, but I thought I'd do it anyway, since he's going to be a guest at Pure Speculation this year.  I'm also reading Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan series to Simon (in the middle of Memory), and The Wheel of Time to Luke (most of the way through Lord of Chaos).  I just finished Kelley Armstrong's Stolen, sequel to Bitten (which was on TV this year, but I didn't watch it past the first episode), which was okay, and am about to start on Adrienne Kress's teen-steampunk The Friday Society; not sure if I'll like that one, because the books of hers that I've read and enjoyed before are more middle-grade, but I'll give it a try.

For nonfiction, I've got a few, on various burners.  Some time ago I started Eleanor of Aquitaine And The Four Kings, and I haven't given up on it yet, but I don't pick it up often; the prose is a little bit old-fashioned, though the book's only from the mid-twentieth century, so I suppose I should call it "affected".  But my recent Crusader Kings II playing has lent it some appeal.  I'm also working my through a book of lists from the Uncle John's Bathroom Institute people, which isn't holding my interest as much of some such books have done in the past.  More recently, I picked up A.J. Jacobs's Drop Dead Healthy; on the one hand, I tend to like his stuff, but this one I bought remaindered, and admittedly it may not be his best.  He's trying to make himself healthier, in a year, and looking at a lot of ways to do so, of varying degrees of wackiness; while it is occasionally entertaining and/or informative, so far it just reminds me how little I've come to trust anybody saying anything about what will make you more or less healthy.  While I was at When Words Collide last weekend I was intrigued by someone mentioning the book What If The Earth Had Two Moons?, and, because we live in the future, put in a library request for it while sitting at the panel; it came in yesterday, and I just started reading it.  Meanwhile, in the wings, I have Of Dice And Men, a history of Dungeons & Dragons, which I'm going to let wait until at least I've finished one of the others.

I also signed up for Marvel Unlimited a little over a year ago; it's a service that lets me read any of the comics that Marvel Comics has made available online.  It's far from a complete collection--newer comics only come out a year after their physical release, though that doesn't bother me because I'm not reading anything new; it's more the middle-range stuff that I'd want to look for, like the Defenders.  What I've ended up doing, though, after looking at a few scattered issues here and there, is starting from the beginning, with Fantastic Four #1 in 1962, and reading from there.  It's taking me a while--I'm only up to early 1967 right now--but I'm enjoying it, especially now that we have a tablet to read them on.  It was physically possible for me to read them on my iPod, but it was far from convenient or easy, and the tablet is working much better for me.  "Spider-Man" and "Fantastic Four" are already really good, and "Thor", "Avengers" and "Doctor Strange" are not bad; "X-Men" is not too hot, though, but then I'm a big Claremont-era fan.  As for the others--"Daredevil", "Iron Man", "Captain America", "Hulk", "Nick Fury", "Sub-mariner"--I was never too much into them, and they're only passable.  A lot of them are still into half-issues right now, so maybe it's the shorter-length stories, and "Daredevil" was never really my thing anyway.  I do look forward to the stage where Stan Lee relaxes his stranglehold on the writing credits, though...not that Roy Thomas has been a big boon to "X-Men" so far.  Hopefully they'll have filled in some of the gaps before I get up to the point where I'd notice them.  (I confess I'm skipping "Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos", as well as any western titles, or "Modeling With Millie"...)