October 4, 2024 - An Odyssey in Collecting Physical Media

In January my fiancee and I moved into our first apartment. Up to this point I had lived with my parents my entire life, and from the time I was little we had always had a media collection of some kind. It was in a continuous state of flux, as media formats came and went. VHSs turned into DVDs shifted to Blu-rays; cassette tapes flattened into CDs transmuted into MP3s on the family computer; picture books melted into early readers ballooned into novels thick enough to lay the foundation of a house. My parents sprang for Netflix back when it was still worth paying for and slowly added a couple more streaming services to the repertoire, but even with these outside sources of entertainment their physical counterparts still have a comfortable place on their shelves.

When you have a shared media collection like that your whole life, you get used to it. You have your own personal collection, but can still borrow stuff from everyone else. It's a great set-up! Until you move out and realize that your personal collection has blind spots and you can't take any of the DVDs or CDs because they were bought by someone else. Okay, no big deal, we can make do with some streaming services. But streaming services are expensive and increasingly don't have the shit you like to watch (or the shit you like to watch is spread out amidst the hellish constellation of exclusive cable network streaming services). I'm guilty of being *very* used to streaming things to my phone or TV, so buying movies and whatnot on disc wasn't on my mind until I didn't have easy access anymore.

The bright side to this upheavel though, is that it made me look at what I have, what I do or don't use, and what I would like to use instead. The convenience of streaming media only has lost its luster. I'm tired of not owning the things I watch anymore and having that access at the whim of corporations that won't hesitate to wipe a property off the map if it gets them a bigger tax write-off. So I've been slowly accumulating DVDs and Blu-rays. CDs, however, are where I've been focusing most of my time and resources lately. I listen to stuff a lot when I'm at work, so having the discs at home and ripping them onto my DAP for on-the-go listening has been a great incentive. Maybe at some point I'll write about my that on its own.

I didn't realize how much I missed the tangibility of physical media. Electronic means still have their place in my life, no doubt about that. I can't collect and store every single piece of media that's ever existed. Frankly, I don't want to. But I can build up my own little archive and browse through that when the infinite discoverability of Spotify or Youtube melt my brain and I need a rock-solid standby to fall back on.