About

What is ZAPCULT?

Well ZAPCULT is intended to be a record of the media consumption of it’s proprietor, that’s me, Woody Sabran. Whenever I watch a film, listen to a cd, read a book, or visit a site that I rate high enough to recommend to others I’ll record it here along with a short description and a famed ZAPCULT rating. If you see a piece of work here that you enjoyed too, give it your own rating and add your own comments.

If you see a film on this site, and you’ve an open mind, there’s a high chance you will enjoy a majority of the other films I’ve commented on. Same with the books and music. Hopefully contact with this site, for no matter how short a time, will lead you to make some media discoveries of your own, and in turn will lead me to make those discoveries too.

Where did you get the idea?

A few months ago, when I was flicking through a few cd’s in my local Fopp, (God I love that shop!). I would go out looking for a bit of work by a particular artist or director and it would seem like the shop knew I was coming, that cd or dvd would always be just there waiting for me on the special feature shelf or something. It struck me as really odd, but after a while I figured that perhaps Fopp employ people to track fashions in music / film taste and then order the appropriate products to suit. This way they would be able to ensure that they had the right stock at the right time. I guess there are other things to consider here, like the time of year or the location of the store, or even the purchases that had taken place in the previous weeks, but at the time it really felt like they were reading my mind! I guess it could be a case of red car syndrome (which I have since found out is actually a recognised phenomena known as The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon), you know, ya buy a red car and suddenly it seems like everyone has one? Of course, they don’t, it’s just that you pay more attention to them. Same applies to everything in life really, think of something and look out for it, you’ll see it more than you expected I promise! Anyway, this applies to the Fopp thing because… well because those cd’s / dvd’s may have always been there I just didn’t pay attention to them before… but ya never know!

So, bearing this potential revelation in mind, I pondered how someone might go about trying to track media fashions (apart from the obvious ones like Big Brother or the World Cup). I guess it must come down to sales ultimately, otherwise things get a little random. Let me just describe a certain route I followed…

I bought Human Traffic on DVD about a 2 years ago, it features a small scene dedicated to Bill Hicks, a comedic genius and one I didn’t forget. A few downloads later (God bless BitTorrent) and I had watched several of Bill’s most famous performances and decided to buy a couple of his DVD’s. Whilst in the store, (Fopp of course!) I spotted that they had a couple of Hicks biographies, I picked one up and couldn’t put it down. After that I bought another book from Fopp, Moondust by Andrew Smith, a really informative read. This lead me to another couple of books, ultimately ending up with Stephen King’s The Stand. I have now made it my personal mission to read every Stephen King Novel!

Can you see how random that route was? How could somebody possibly predict that I would end up being a Hicks fan, a Stephen King Evangelist and a solid believer in the Moon landings just from one original purchase?!

I wanted to find out if other people had experienced similar incidents or coincidences. The way to do that was, without a doubt, online, and so ZAPCULT was born. It’s not my first web outing, that was a site called UN1T (http://www.un1t.co.uk), it had about 10,000 unique visitors which I was pretty happy with but then I got bored, as you do, so I started again with a new one. I’m sure it won’t be my last either, but this time I’m determined to stick with it.

More about me

I’m a web designer by trade, I work for an upcoming Design Agency in Bath called Plum. Whilst I’m not toiling away at work, probably tackling another IE bug of some sort, I read, watch, listen, surf, and occasionally play. I love recommendations, and so thought I ought to make some of my own, hence ZAPCULT. Please, if you see anything on here and you think: “he really ought to watch that / listen to this / read them / go there” let me know. I figure that from the moment you are born, you are playing catch-up on the last few decades of media output. I’m trying my best to do just that, in order to allow me to better judge contemporary content, and, someday I hope, allow me to add my own contributions.