The media consumer diary stack: Trakt, Last.fm, and Steam
A lot of leisure time is media. Not “watching a film” or “playing a game” in isolation, but the way a Saturday actually goes: an album while you cook, an episode after dinner, an hour in a game before bed. Three different forms of attention, three different paces, all stacked into the same evening.
A media journal that captures only one of them captures only a slice. A media journal that captures all three reads like the evening.
deariary already has integrations for each: Trakt for films and TV, Last.fm for listening, and Steam for gaming. The three deep-dives cover what each collects on its own. This post is about the layer above: what changes when you run all three together.
Three layers, almost no overlap
The reason these three work as a stack is that almost no part of a media-heavy day belongs to more than one of them. The film you watched is not in your scrobbles. The album that played while you cooked is not on your watch history. The roguelike session before bed is not in either.
Each layer captures a different mode of attention. Films are foreground: a 90 to 180 minute commitment with a clear start and end. Music is the weather of the room while you cook, work, or wind down. Games are the hours that disappear without records anywhere else, where two hours felt like fifteen minutes and by morning you cannot reconstruct what happened. None of the three substitutes for the others.
How a stacked day reads
A Saturday with all three connected might produce raw data that looks like:
12:30 Album play: Caroline Polachek - Desire, I Want to Turn Into You (47 min)
14:15 Watch: Aftersun (2022, 102 min) rating 9/10
reaction: "Quietly destroyed"
17:40 Album play: Burial - Untrue (51 min)
20:25 Game: Outer Wilds (+95 min)
achievement: "End Times"
22:00 Album play: Mazzy Star - So Tonight That I Might See (36 min)Six events, none overlapping. The LLM weaves it into something like:
Saturday started with Caroline Polachek’s Desire, I Want to Turn Into You playing through the early afternoon. The matinee was Aftersun, which left a one-line reaction of “quietly destroyed” and a 9 attached to it. The afternoon turned to Burial’s Untrue, the kind of late album for a couch. In the evening you spent an hour and a half on Outer Wilds and reached End Times. The night closed with Mazzy Star’s So Tonight That I Might See.
Six events became one Saturday. The Polachek album is the cooking-and-laundry block before the matinee. Burial is the post-film silence that needed to be filled with something but not with conversation. The Outer Wilds session is the part of the day that would have left no trace at all without the gaming layer, and the achievement makes a specific moment of that session readable months from now. The Mazzy Star album closes the night the way the day actually closed.
Three months from now, reading this Saturday back, the three layers do different work. The film carries the emotional center: the reaction, written ten minutes after the credits, is the part you cannot reconstruct from anywhere else. The music carries the texture between events: without the scrobbles, the gap between the matinee and the game session is a blank. The game carries an evening that would otherwise vanish: a 95-minute session that produced one achievement and no other artifacts is invisible to almost any other tool.
A film-only entry would say “watched Aftersun.” A music-only entry would say “three albums played.” A game-only entry would say “ninety minutes of Outer Wilds.” The stacked entry says what the day was.
When the three intersect
Most of the time the three layers do not overlap. Occasionally they do, and the overlaps are the most readable parts of the diary.
A soundtrack listen on the evening you watched the film. Music shows the album, watch history shows the film. The diary catches that you went home and put on Mica Levi’s score the same night.
A long playthrough of one game with one album on repeat. Two ten-hour weeks of Disco Elysium might line up with two weeks of mostly post-punk in the scrobbles. The diary will not flag this as a pattern in any single entry, but a month later, scrolling back, the pairing will be obvious.
A binge weekend where the show carries everything. The watch layer fills, the music layer goes quiet, the game layer goes quiet. The diary reads like a binge weekend because that is what it was, and the absence of the other two is part of the picture.
The plan you need
The Free plan supports one active integration, enough to test any of these three on its own. The full stack needs the Basic plan, which supports up to five integrations and leaves room for two more sources alongside the media trio (a calendar and a messaging or social tool, typically). The current plan breakdown is on the deariary homepage.
A note on order
If you are connecting all three for the first time, a reasonable order is the gaming layer first, then the music layer, then the watch layer. Each takes well under a minute. The gaming layer goes first because it surfaces evenings that would otherwise be invisible, so the value shows up immediately even on a slow gaming week. The music layer goes second because if you already scrobble from any player, your existing pipe starts flowing without further setup. The watch layer goes last because the most useful thing you can give yourself there is the habit of writing a one-line reaction right after a film ends, and that habit is easier to start once the rest of the diary is already producing entries you want to read.
After the third connection, the next morning’s entry includes whichever of the three had activity. On a quiet music week with no films and no gaming, the entry will be light on media. On a Saturday with all three, the entry will read like a Saturday.
What media is not
The stack does not capture everything. Books are not in it. Podcasts are not in it (most podcast players do not scrobble). Reading articles, browsing, and YouTube are not in it. A media-heavy life that is mostly text or mostly podcasts will need different sources, and some of those sources will need a webhook bridge until native integrations exist.
What the stack covers well is the visual, audio, and gaming layer of leisure time. For a lot of people, that is most of leisure time, and the three of them together produce something that no single one of them produces alone: a media journal that reads like the evenings, not like three lists stacked on top of each other.
