the queue

One of the fun things I remember about Netflix in its early days was twiddling with "the queue." You always had to manage your queue so that as soon as you returned whatever it was you were watching, they'd send out the next one. And Netflix was pretty fast about it, too--you have to give them that. I and my friends would spend hours browsing old movies we'd either missed the first time around or wanted to see again, and they'd all go in the queue.

The thing was, once the time rolled around when you actually were due for your next, you seldom felt like watching that particular movie anymore. Netflix may be fast, but they still weren't up to instant-gratification speed. And of course in the old days, the problem was that you had to finish whatever they sent you before you could start on the next one--by which time your mood and preferences might be completely different.

But now! Wow--with streaming video, you can have anything you want, right now.

This came home to me in a big way yesterday when I discovered that the Playstation 3 will stream Netflix "watch it now" goodies for you instantly via its wireless internet connection. All you need is a little CD, which the Netflix people will send you for free within 24 hours of your request, to make it all work. And work it does. Now, you can stream video anyway using your own computer--and I did, sometimes. But it's kind of cool to get it to play right to your living room.

Of course, what this means is that yesterday afternoon and evening we spent hours (hours!) watching "Meercat Manor" and the new series, "Dead Like Me," which, as it turned out, I absolutely loved. "Dead Like Me" is a very dark-humored show about grim reapers--dead people who are appointed to escort the newly-dead to their appointed destinations, whatever those might be (and the grim reapers don't know themselves--the destinies of the dead are not their destinies, don't you know, so basically the show very cleverly avoids addressing any questions at all about death, life, religion, anything). I watched only the pilot; I hope the series continues to remain as good.

But about that queue! You can put just about anything in your queue. And the queue has come to represent to me all the happy things you're looking forward to enjoying in the future. I'm all about the queue.

My Netflix queue so far (and my queue has been limited only by the fact that every once in a while I really do need to sleep, despite all the things I want to do) has, in addition to the two series above, "The Tudors," Carl Sagan's "Cosmos," "Arrested Development" (the episodes I somehow never got around to), and a bunch of recent and old movies I'd missed when they were released, like "The Reckoning" (based on the book by one of my favorite authors, Barry Unsworth), "The Shipping News," and "I've Loved You So Long," with Kristin Scott Thomas, which looks like such a tear-jerker that I may just have to keep on postponing it for a while.

But these aren't the only things I have queued up. I also have my electronic book queue, which I have generated via Google Books. Google Books just keeps getting better and better. Now, if you have an electronic book reader like a Sony or the much-touted Nook, you can download these things right to a slim little machine about the size of an old-style calculator and carry them around with you anywhere. But you can also just read them on your computer, and if you're like me and can't be separated by more than three feet from your laptop before going into asphyxiation, then you're going to have that within arms-reach at all times anyway.

So here's a partial compendium of my Google Books queue so far:

The Complete Works of Shakespeare
The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde
The Canterbury Tales
Grimm's Fairy Tales
Boswell's Life of Johnson
The L. Frank Braum books (the Oz books)
Giambattista Basile's "Il Pentamerone"
Giovanni Straparola's "The Facetious Nights"
Peter Pan
Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass
George MacDonald's "The Princess and the Goblins"
Darwin's "The Voyage of the Beagle"
Don Quixote
Crime and Punishment (like I'm really going to read this! But I should....)
David Copperfield
Rousseau's "The Confessions"
Bram Stoker's "Dracula"
Austen's "Emma" and "Pride and Prejudice"

The future's looking pretty good from this angle! So much to read and see. I'll tell you--it's almost enough to make up for having to eat all that FOCC.