Mine magazine is Time Inc.’s latest gambit to make print profitable. Both praised and panned, Mine is a collection of supposedly personalized stories — selected just for me! — wrapped in Lexus ads and mailed to me for free. It usually doesn’t feel particularly personal. But it’s all mine.

When I signed up, I was presented with a list of eight magazines (Food & Wine, Golf, InStyle, Money, Real Simple, Sports Illustrated, Time and Travel + Leisure), from which I selected five. That’s customization. Because everyone likes at least five of those eight things.

To really get a look deep into my psyche and make sure Mine is perfectly tailored to me, I was also asked whether I crave pizza or sushi more, whether I’d prefer to learn to juggle or impersonate celebrities, and whether I’d rather dine with Socrates or da Vinci. Therein lie the answers to the deep mysteries of my reading preferences.

Fast Company called Mine a “printed RSS feed.” Not quite. My RSS feed lets me flag a number of sites and get instant alerts whenever they publish anything new. Mine gave me eight content buckets to pick from, I selected five, and now every two weeks some unseen chooser dips into each bucket, ladles some stories out and pours them into Mine — apparently based on whether I want to eat pizza with Socrates before my juggling lesson or snack on sushi with Leonardo while I shout in a lame Austrian accent, “Get in the chopper!” The result, of course, is not something that feels much like mine. Still, it might actually work if they weren’t spooning from content buckets so old they have moss growing on them.

My latest issue of Mine arrived last Thursday, the same day the NBA finals began. Mine included a Sports Illustrated story about how playoff games are sometimes won and lost on the apparent capriciousness of the referee’s whistle. It’s a story I’d normally be interested in…if it hadn’t first run in SI’s April 27 issue. The deck included the words “As the first round starts, a look at at the hardest call of all.” The first round of the playoffs started April 18, nearly seven weeks before I received this story in Mine. The story then begins, “At this time of year…” Which time of year is that? Months ago?

It’s probably not a good idea to send me a customized magazine meant to recreate in paper form the immediate personalization of an RSS feed, and include in said magazine a story from mid-April with an unaltered deck and lead clearly marking it as nearly two months old, and including in that aged story a sidebar listing five defenders with “the best chance of changing the outcome of a playoff game by popping up in the path of a scorer” when four of the five are no longer playing in the playoffs. Jermaine O’Neal and James Posey weren’t exactly game changers in last night’s finals game.