April: a month with surprisingly less time than I expected for media intake.

I noted at the end of the March report that I thought April might be a loss month, but it actually turned out to be slightly stronger for quantity, but there’s a definite quality loss experienced. We’ll dig into that later.

The report for April is a bit lighter, due to added stress in real life and delays in getting it written, but you’re not here for my life, you’re here for data and badly Photoshopped graphs, and I’m here to deliver.

Anyway, let’s talk reading:

Y’all know the drill by now…let’s move on.

I’ve already done a bit of reading for May that’ll provoke some deeper reportage, mostly on how I’m handling reading single issues of comics in the data, so get excited.

April was a big drain on mental resources, so I played it pretty safe with my media consumption. How do I mean?

Well, let’s start with some raw numbers. In March, I had 34 entries into my “watching / listening” tracker. In April, I had 38. You’d think that would at least a little bit of variety, right?

All of my media coming from after the dawn of the 21st century can’t be a bit of homogeneity that extends to any other sections of the report, can it?

This graph might look varied to you, but it looks exactly the same as March’s genre graph to me, save for one addition: Marvel’s Daredevil, which I jammed through over a weekend because I work in social media, but like to avoid spoilers. (“I’m a contrary son of a bitch,” as Daredevil’s titular hero Matt Murdock says in one episode.)

Worth noting is that a lot of my media consumption remained TV-based and April’s the big month of shows getting towards their May finales. As a result, the TV stuff starts to look boring, especially in a time where there are so many shows airing at the same time I like — and so many I feel obligated to stay current with — due to the very experiment that is producing this very report.

While it might sound like TV was doing all of the driving, it’s worth noting that the big anomaly in media consumption in April was listening to quite a few new podcasts, as the medium graph will attest:

Podcasts have been a steadily growing area of media consumption for me and April represented a pretty banner month, with old heavies like 99% Invisible, The Bugle, and recent favorite Criminal getting new support from the likes of Our National Conversation About Conversations About Race and Mike and Tom Eat Snacks — an old favorite I’m catching up on now that my fierce love of Tom Cavanaugh has been re-sparked by The Flash.

The three movies watched in April were 2011's Fast Five, 2013's Fast & Furious 6, and 2015's latest installment: Furious Seven. I’m a big fan of what I call “the Fast and/or Furious franchise,” and I really dug the latest installment. The series’ rapid transformation from “Point Break with cars” to “insane 90's action movie car stunt franchise” has been greatly appreciated at a personal level. Your mileage may vary.

No, I will not apologize for that pun.

I noted earlier that my TV consumption was a bit strained in April, so let’s dig a bit into that:

The vast quantity of televised material I watched were series currently airing in 2015, many barreling towards finales, such as Vice, The Flash, Arrow, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and Scandal. Some series ended, like 12 Monkeys. These were supported by all-season standards like the Daily and Nightly shows, Rachel Maddow, and the year-long Super Sentai / Kamen Rider entries Ninninger and Drive.

That doesn’t include the two 2014 series that I finished in April, 2014's first season of The Musketeers and the HBO miniseries The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst, both of which were great in totally different ways.

Oh yeah, country of origin:

Nothing new or exciting there. Still gotta find something from a different country to watch before end of year. Ongoing goal.

Digging into the Whovian section of the report, things look similarly homogenous, starting with medium:

I finally finished 1974's “Death to the Daleks,” which continues my watch-through of TV Doctor Who. My big goal for May is to finally finish Season 11 and get a bit more headway towards ending my time in the Third Doctor era.

While my overall intake was a bit diminished in April, I still have a daily commute, so I managed to maintain my intake of Big Finish audio adventures, which leads to a predictable decades breakdown:

See how 2000s / 2010s heavy things are? That’s all audio drama.

As a result of all of this audio-listening, my exposure to the various Doctors becomes equally predictable if you know anything about Big Finish Productions’ main range for Doctor Who output:

Aside from Jon Pertwee’s TV adventure, those are all of the main Big Finish Doctors, save Eighth Doctor Paul McGann, right there. I’m up to the point in Big Finish where the “main range” Doctors (5, 6, and 7) each get three-story mini-seasons and I listened to one block each for Davision and McCoy, and two blocks from Colin Baker. Two Tom Baker adventures, both featuring the amazing Lalla Ward as Romana II, round out the Big Finish adventures.

My favorite audio listen of April was probably Sixth Doctor story “The Raincloud Man,” which features the return of recurring Big Finish character DI Patricia Menzies, a no-nonsense, alien-aware Manchester detective who compliments the Sixth Doctor in the same way Prof. Bernice Summerfield does for the Seventh Doctor and Charley Pollard does for the Eighth.

Mentioning Charley in that last bit is more for general Who fandom and less for me, as I find her adventures with the Sixth more entertaining than I did those between her and the Eighth, but I’ve generally tended to blunder onto the opposite side of popular opinion in my time as a Who fan.*

*See also: “Rose is my least favorite companion” and / or “the Tenth Doctor is in the bottom two of my personal Doctor rankings”.

Enough fan-chatter, let’s wrap this up: