My tastes run toward superheroes, science fiction, fantasy, mysteries, comedy, dramas, and documentaries. I watch very little of news, sports, game shows, and reality TV. Most of what I watch is in English, but I also watch a fair amount of foreign-language stuff, particularly from East Asia and Western Europe.

To minimize costs, I alternate streaming services. I currently have Disney+, Peacock Premium, a free Hulu subscription through Spotify, and Amazon Prime.

I normally have Amazon Prime, Disney+, Netflix, or Max as my main service, and I may also subscribe to some niche services. These may include CrunchyRoll, Funimation, HIDIVE, or VRV for anime, Viki or Kocowa for Korean dramas, Apple TV+ for some of its original content, and Arrow for horror and cult movies. When they go on sale, I sometimes subscribe to various specialty channels through Amazon Prime. I also sometimes use free services like IMBD TV, Peacock, TubiTV, and YouTube. In the past, I have subscribed to CBS All Access, which has now become Paramount+, to DC Universe, which has been incorporated into HBO Max, which is just Max now, and to DramaFever, which got shut down. I have not yet subscribed to Kocowa, but I may someday.

I grew up before streaming started providing many viewing options, and pickings were slimmer back then. Being limited to what was on TV at the time, I would watch soap operas, mediocre sit-coms, and children's cartoons. When VCRs and DVD players became available, I appreciated how these gave me more control over what I watched. I didn't have to watch shows when they aired, and I borrowed lots of movies from the public library. But streaming is what has made the biggest difference. With streaming, I have become much more selective in what I watch, and I'm able to avoid the mediocre filler programming I used to watch.

Before finding this site, I was already listing my anime and Asian dramas on sites which specialize in these, and I'm glad I found this site, which lets me list almost all of my movies and programs, whether western or Asian, live-action or animated. Its main drawback seems to be the occasional gap in its catalog. Since I had already watched a lot before finding this site, my listings and ratings here are often based on distant memory, and I've surely missed some things that I've seen. I have relied on my viewing history data from Netflix and Amazon to fill in gaps for the 2010s, and I will add more as memory allows.

The scale I use goes like this: 10 is a masterpiece, 9 is great, 8 is very good, 7 is good, 6 is fine, 5 is so-so, 4 is bad, 3 is very bad, 2 is horrible, and 1 is appalling. This is mostly borrowed from myanimelist.net, but it replaces average with so-so. My average rating skews upward, because I spend more time watching what I like than watching what I don't like.