Not having to dedicate a corner of my house to a physical warehouse for media is genuinely really nice.
I have an old vinyl collection and my toddler son is constantly trying to pull these 50 year old records off the walls to play with them. No idea how my parents dealt with me digging through their VHS catalog at every opportunity.
To each their own, but I miss not having that tactile browsing experience.
Growing up, my mum kept an actual catalogue of what was on each one of our home-recorded VHS tapes as well as their timestamps!
But back to OPs original point - it is strange how we have just normalised not obtaining our own copies of media as they’re provided to us. All the more reason to fully support pirating any materials you can (legally) access.
I miss not having that tactile browsing experience.
It’s easy to forget the space these things consumed, the way they degraded over time, and the expense of building a collection.
$15-30 a tape ($30-60 in modern dollars) relative to modern digital piracy that let’s me assemble a collection worth $1000s within a matter of hours for free.
Nevermind the difficulty of getting transitions (subs or dubs) from foreign releases. The Internet revolutionized fan edits and international releases, giving me access to everything from the Russian neo-noirs Night Watch / Day Watch to the Japanese anime Full Metal Alchemist years before they would have been available in the States in the 80s/90s.
Not having to dedicate a corner of my house to a physical warehouse for media is genuinely really nice.
I have an old vinyl collection and my toddler son is constantly trying to pull these 50 year old records off the walls to play with them. No idea how my parents dealt with me digging through their VHS catalog at every opportunity.
To each their own, but I miss not having that tactile browsing experience.
Growing up, my mum kept an actual catalogue of what was on each one of our home-recorded VHS tapes as well as their timestamps!
But back to OPs original point - it is strange how we have just normalised not obtaining our own copies of media as they’re provided to us. All the more reason to fully support pirating any materials you can (legally) access.
It’s easy to forget the space these things consumed, the way they degraded over time, and the expense of building a collection.
$15-30 a tape ($30-60 in modern dollars) relative to modern digital piracy that let’s me assemble a collection worth $1000s within a matter of hours for free.
Nevermind the difficulty of getting transitions (subs or dubs) from foreign releases. The Internet revolutionized fan edits and international releases, giving me access to everything from the Russian neo-noirs Night Watch / Day Watch to the Japanese anime Full Metal Alchemist years before they would have been available in the States in the 80s/90s.