Primary Huntress, Mistress Of Metadata, Database Designer and Programming Director

Hi, I'm Mandy, and I'll be your documentarian this post. I believe you've already met Erin; she's my wife, partner, cohort in crime and favorite enabler ❤️

I say enabler because I tend to think of my hobbies in terms of addiction. I've always had a tendency towards going all-in on whatever I was doing… When I started reading about physics (well, insofar as chemistry is applied physics) in seventh grade, I couldn't stop until I'd taught myself both calculus and matrix mechanics so that I could predict the decay behavior of unstable isotopes given nothing more than an atomic symbol and weight. Had I any ability to maintain focus, I might be another Einstein today, but by the time I'd learned all that I was also learning to push my poor Apple ][ past it's breaking point. Instead I turned my attention towards penny stocks, on which my father's bookie… er, broker (same guy, honestly) traded, and turned my lawn care earnings into an Apple //e by investing in a small business called Kindercare, the first publicly-traded day care for children. That little adventure made me wonder how much difference there was between investing and gambling, which led to a series of symposiums that my dad conducted for me at Cahokia Downs.

I fear I have digressed, though… perhaps you don't even see how my sequence of obsessions are comparable to addiction, although if that's the case I can dig up an old episode of Horizon about the effects of dopamine-release on a chemically-imbalanced brain. Regardless, while I didn't need Erin to enable those addictions, I find it easier to downgrade "addiction" to "obsession" when the point of hyperfocus is shared.

Recently though, we've been screening old episodes of "American Pickers" while I'm working, and that show has nearly convinced me that I could find others who are interested in my current obsession. I might be able to downgrade "obsession" even further, terming it as nothing more than a "collection". Like the 2500 comic books I collected in 18 months after reading a friend's copy of Marvel's Secret Wars... Nothing obsessive about that, right?

So obviously, the addiction/obsession/collection to which I now refer is my documentary library. Both Erin and I are endlessly fascinated by, well, almost any kind of information, so her constant interest, stated favorites and viewing tendencies all feed directly in to my need to collect, and my tendency towards completion. It makes my brain itch if I have every episode of "Drain The Oceans" available to us, except S02E10 and S03E01… I just don't know how people live like that. I need to find those last two episodes.

The other service I provide in maintaining our documentary collection is the metadata that I contribute as time and attention allow, sometimes briefly stopping to enter only the most interesting note while other times taking extensive notes on every person, place, artifact and idea presented in a program. Other times, I fill find now only the episode summary from TVDB but also dive into credits on IMDB so I can record the director, screenwriter or cinematographer that really caught my eye... or so we can group all documentaries which Michael Woods has presented into a single easy list, for instance. Unfortunately, for the moment the most you will see of this metadata is hints of what I do in the tagging of our posts. However, I'm a software developer with a lot of metadata, a few databases and heaps of experience in making that data useful, so you can expect to regularly see new features presenting information about the documentaries we discuss and others that are related which we may not have time to mention.

Of course, fulfilling my roles as Primary Huntress, Mistress Of Metadata, Database Designer and Programming Director all takes time, even with an enabler… er, with encouragement from someone I love and respect. On top of all those roles, I have a full time job which wants me to do much the same thing with much less interesting data (although on the plus side I don't have watch TV or search the net for it... it just shows up that way). Sadly, for the time being what this means is that I'll be less able to generate the number of reviews she does; the other side of the coin, however, is that I sometimes have a much different view of the shows that we watch. While we generally agree on quality (I believe she stated my Documentary Content Inversion Principal in another post: "The most narrowly-defined the topic of the documentary is, the more likely it is to be fascinating."), we don't always notice the same things about them. I'm far more likely to find two or three documentaries on related subjects and compare/contrast the views they present and the way they present them, and I intend to present a period list of the new documentaries (or new-to-me at least) which I find to be interesting that week, whether they were just broadcast, just became available or just got discovered in some dusty corner of the internet.

I'm really looking forward to putting together my first weekly summation of what we're seeing, what we're about to see and what we're not. Unfortunately, I'm also fighting a severe lack of hard drive space since we just lost two drives, so I'm fighting a losing war of indexing data appropriately so it can be found and retrieved in cloud storage while also recording the shows we want to see. It is a war I'm winning though, however slowly, so that post will be coming soon. Until then, if you have any questions or suggestions please feel free to leave them in the comments. Thanks all, and please remember to reward your favorite internet content creators (or us, if you'd prefer) in any way you can 😍