Sunday, August 29, 2010

Jason modifies his estimate of total minutes of movies watched

So you may notice since early this year I've been keeping track of all the minutes I spend watching movies. At the end of every post is a running time of the movie(s) I watched, and "My Total Minutes"

As I think I explained when I started doing this, My Total Minutes is based on an estimate of all the movies I've watched since 2005, when I started tracking all the movies I watch. At the time I estimated 90 minutes/feature length movie program (a low estimate for mainstream blockbusters, but fairly accurate for most film festival fare).

Well, in my spare minutes, I've also been going through my records and piecing together how many minutes of running time I've spent watching movies. This is actually a pretty tricky task. Many movies have multiple versions, and I don't always know or remember which version I saw. And it's only trickier since I started watching a lot of silent film. A lot of old obscure shorts don't have running times listed in IMDb, and a lot depend on the projector speed. Anyway, I've finally finished cataloging--to the best of my knowledge--the total minutes I spent watching movies...in 2009. 444 movies (also an upward estimate, because I remembered a few movies I forgot to count) and 43,295 minutes. That comes out to about 97.5 minutes/move (actually, 97.5112612612612...). So from now until I make my way through the movies I saw in 2008 (and possibly earlier), My Total Minutes is based on:
  • The total minutes of movies so far in 2010, plus
  • The total minutes of movies watched in 2009, plus
  • The total number of movies watched prior to 2009, times the average minutes/movie in 2009 (I may update this multiplier with the movies I watched in 2010 so far. For the record, it has been 96.9 minutes/movie so far this year).
Anyway, that brings my new (still estimated, but better estimated) grand total to 207,511 minutes. That's right, I just--rather unceremoniously--blew past 200,000 minutes.

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