11 ms·
It can become a compulsion to record and collect media. Seems like a male thing, normally it's blokes who create these archives. I met a bloke once in the 90's
by fallinditch 2y ago
It can become a compulsion to record and collect media. Seems like a male thing, normally it's blokes who create these archives.
I met a bloke once in the 90's who made recordings on to C-90 tapes of anything interesting that was on BBC Radio 4 and 3, and he found most things interesting. He was surrounded by piles, thousands of tapes everywhere and he was desperately trying to catalog everything. As I spoke to him he was listening to the radio via an ear bud, whilst also recording the radio. He was supposed to be moving out of his house that day, having just exchanged contacts, but he was drowning in his precious tapes. His wife seemed pretty p**d off with him.
I was a bit compulsive myself. I used to buy records, then CDs, and I also made tapes of albums, and recordings of the John Peel show. It was a problem to shift 100s of records and CDs and boxes of tapes whenever I moved house. I lightened my load by giving everything away apart from the Peel tapes which were the most entertaining items in the whole collection, it actually felt good. I kept hold of the Peel tapes for some years, even though my tape deck had died. There were some great shows from the 90s! But then I had to downsize again so I took them to the rubbish tip, even that didn't make me sad.
Ultimately, having and keeping stuff just weighs you down.
- dangsux 2y ago[dead]
- Sakos 2y agoWhy the BBC? It should go to archives like archive.org and publicly accessible "pirate" archives, so corporations like the BBC can't stick it in a vault and bury it.
- dylan604 2y agoBecause the BBC might actually be interested in plugging holes in their own archive.
- userbinator 2y agoThey can do that from archive.org
- dylan604 2y agoYour assuming that the archival format would be the same or that there's not anything else specific for their needs. Everybody thinks their snowflake is special, and definitely more special than anyone else's snowflake.
- randomdata 2y agoYou're assuming that people can't get along. Is there some reason the BBC and archive.org can't work together to satisfy both of their wants and needs?
- dylan604 2y agoYou sound like you've never worked with multiple vendors essentially needing the same thing but want different things.
- randomdata 2y agoNo need to draw on past experience. I'm watching it unfold right here. Quite hilarious.
- dangsux 2y ago[dead]
- cortesoft 2y agoLuckily, hoarding digital media is a lot easier and doesn't take up much space.
- Sakos 2y agoYeah, my 30TB of digital media fits in a shoebox and even doubling that would still fit in the same shoebox. It's also not something that takes up a lot of time unless you let it take over your life. Maybe a few hours a week of gathering new media (movies, shows, games, YouTube videos, etc.), then I move on with my life and do other things. I've effectively given up on collecting DVDs or anything else that takes up too much space, and it's such a load off my mind not having to worry about where to out it all, how to display it, or even how to transport it whenever I move.
- ghaff 2y agoYeah, the correct answer is to basically chuck it all. If you have a bit of possibly unique content, perhaps contact a relevant archive (which I did recently) but otherwise accept that you don't need to find a home for everything. Books, DVDs, and CDs can go to your local library's book sale though most will end up pulped. VHSs are mostly just trash at this point even if someone, somewhere might want them.
- HPsquared 2y agoI keep my DVDs on those spindles that recordable discs come on. I take the paper and the disc, and throw out the case unless it's a really special one.
- jacobgkau 2y agoUnluckily, that means there's no physical check on it to prompt you to stop like physical media has.
- knowitnone 2y agoexcept there is a limit because each drive holds a limited amount of data because it is physical media. And you can argue cloud storage but they have a limit as well as price.
- pessimizer 2y ago> Seems like a male thing, normally it's blokes who create these archives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Stokes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Stokes > Stokes bequeathed her son Michael Metelits the entire tape collection, with no instructions other than to donate it to a charity of his choice. After considering potential recipients, Metelits gave the collection to the Internet Archive one year after Stokes's death. Four shipping containers were required to move the collection to Internet Archive's headquarters in San Francisco, a move that cost her estate $16,000. It was the largest collection they had ever received. The group agreed to digitize the volumes, a process expected to run fully on round-the-clock volunteers, costing $2 million and taking 20 digitizing machines several years to complete. As of April 2019, the project is still active.
- lazyasciiart 2y agoSurely someone in this thread can give an update on the status of that digitization project?
- exitb 2y agoThe outwardly visible status is that just a small portion of the recordings have been made available[1]. The Archive is not commenting about this for years now. [1] https://archive.org/details/stokestvarchiveexperiment https://archive.org/details/stokestvarchiveexperiment
- nicolas_t 2y agoThat’s rather disappointing. Expected more from the internet archive.
- MonkeyClub 2y agoExpectations are free, actual work costs time and money though.
- 2y ago
- VoodooJuJu 2y ago>Ultimately, having and keeping stuff just weighs you down. This, so much this! We should own nothing. Then we'll be happy!
- grugagag 2y agoGenerally it’s more about earthly possessions that we should not have too much of but from that to nothing is a bit of a stretch. I want to own a few personal things but not enough to produce physical or psychological clutter
- ahartmetz 2y agoWhat's the purpose of going to the extreme of having no stuff, anyway? I like to have a collection of tools and parts as well as a collection of books. As a child, I could find books in our collection at home, and when visiting friends with a book collection, I like to browse it and ask about some of the books. I have and use an e-reader, but the reading experience is a little worse and browsing is much worse.
- randomdata 2y ago> I like to have a collection of tools and parts as well as a collection of books. But, with respect to the parent, would it matter if you didn't own them? What if, say, tools, parts, and books belonged to the land? There for you to use, but if you move to another plot of land you wouldn't take them with you, but instead would have another set of tools, parts, and books waiting for you when you arrive. Would something about that make you less happy?
- MonkeyClub 2y agoI think GP was referencing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/You%27ll_own_nothing_and_be_happy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/You%27ll_own_nothing_and_be_...
- ahartmetz 2y agoNot owning would not make much difference, but selection does. The tools are for the things that I like to do, and for the books, selection is even more important becase there are so many to choose from and so relatively few that are "mine".
- faangguyindia 2y agoTangent but I've huge collection of comics. I am waiting for AI to get good enough so that I can turn it into knowledgebase
- knowitnone 2y agoyeah, I doubt you'll scan all that into your AI. Prove me wrong.
- dunham 2y agoThat's been my strategy with photos for the last couple of decades. I don't bother organizing them, figuring ML/image classification will do the trick eventually. I'll probably never bother, but it has saved me the time of organizing it. (Apple does let me search based on its object classification, and I have searched for tag that came on my apple tree based on a word that appears on it, so I guess that strategy has worked somewhat.)
- ghaff 2y agoI used to have a pretty granular hierarchical store. These days I mostly figure that if I need it I’ll find it with some key exceptions.
- chongli 2y agoNot just a male thing! [1] It might be the case that men are more likely to be collectors/hoarders in general but there definitely are women who partake. I will also say that the type of thing being collected matters. Go to an estate sale for a woman (especially one born before 1960) and you may see collections of dolls, tea services, certain types of paintings, etc. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Stokes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Stokes
- Wistar 2y agoDang! You beat me to it.
- trigganiggaz 2y ago[dead]
- Wistar 2y agoI think I made this comment in error. Not sure to what I thought I was responding but it makes no sense.
- lynx23 2y agoIf women get known for their hoarding, its typically for animals, not living things. Which is, if you think about it long enough, a lot more creepy!
- trigganiggaz 2y ago[dead]
- lukan 2y agoRather for shoes, or for clothes.
- kvmet 2y agoDid you misspeak? Animals are generally living things
- lofaszvanitt 2y agoThose stored things are your digital roots. Without them, you are nobody.
- Mistletoe 2y agoI like the sentiment but I think most people I know would be better off freed from their hoarded items and actually able to be somebody. Your comment does remind me of the replicants from Blade Runner and how they need their “precious photos” that aren’t even real as a touchstone to link them to the implanted memories.
- jodrellblank 2y ago> and actually able to be somebody. be who?
- wholinator2 2y agoI can't tell if this is facetious or not, but be the person that they are. The whole rest of the person besides the obsession. Maybe with some extra freedom and time they can build up their other interests and relationships. Grandfather comment or so said the guys wife was upset with him. Without the piles of tapes he could replace "tape guy" with "happier relationship" and "successfully moved". Literally everything else about the person is who they are. Narrowing a persons whole identity down to a collection of objects is a neurotic and reductive take on personhood, in my opinion
- thowawatp302 2y agoThe person who they are is the one who spent the time and effort to collect them. The collection is a /product/ of that time and effort, not the other way around. People who didn’t do this are someone else
- _w1tm 2y ago> The person who they are is the one who spent the time and effort to collect them. > The collection is a /product/ of that time and effort, not the other way around. Does the person cease to be if the collection is trashed? Or is the collection just detritus from the process, something that could have been discarded instead of hoarded?
- herodotus 2y agoI went to a talk once from a man who collected antique magic props. He said when he moved he needed a 1 ton container for his stuff. At the end of the talk, someone asked if his wife objected to his collection. He said "She doesn't complain about my magic stuff, and I don't complain about her Teddy Bears."
- api 2y agoI hoard interesting digital media a bit since stuff does disappear from the Internet, but don't hoard anything physical. Takes up too much space.
- rcarmo 2y agohttps://archivebox.io/ https://archivebox.io/ For those with an interest. My del.icio.us collection (what was still online) lives on my NAS now.
- dboreham 2y agoNot a bad idea given the BBC would just record over their archive tapes.
- hakcermani 2y agoThere was a guy who collected tanks ! Had his collection up top of Portola Valley. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Vehicle_Technology_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Vehicle_Technology_Fo...]
- dzink 2y agoIt was incredible. One of the things we saw randomly that we wish we could see again.
- iforgotpassword 2y agoAt least the tendency seems more pronounced in men, but that might just be perception. Anyways: > Apparently there were so many tapes because the original owner, a now elderly man, had made the recordings for his neighbour. Really made me chuckle. "hey Billy, can you like, record 500 days of continuous TV program for me that would be great, thanks!" Likely asked him to record a few shows in the beginning and then the hoarding kicked in? Otherwise I'm wondering why a) the tapes were still at his place and not his neighbor's and b) why he didn't keep taping over the same few tapes. :-)
- achairapart 2y agoAnd today you can listen to (most of?) those John Peel sessions again: https://davestrickson.blogspot.com/2020/05/john-peel-sessions.html https://davestrickson.blogspot.com/2020/05/john-peel-session... The circle has been closed!
- fallinditch 2y agoThat's awesome, what a treasure trove :-) thanks for sharing. You can also download a huge number of shows via the John Peel Wiki [1] and look out for Phil's Mighty Database. There's also a torrent out there, a huge archive of Peel shows known as The Motherlode, well worth nabbing. [1] https://peel.fandom.com/wiki/John_Peel_Wiki https://peel.fandom.com/wiki/John_Peel_Wiki
- madaxe_again 2y agoMy godfather has about 50,000 VHS tapes of TV recordings - all catalogued and neatly stored in huge pull-out racks that ⅔ of his three bedroom apartment (he’s single) are dedicated to. He wrote a cataloguing system in qbasic, having never coded before - these days he’s got a web app. I will one day be inheriting this lot, and have no damned idea what I’m going to do with them.
- calamity_elf 2y agoThat's a colossal number of tapes. The few I found that had been stored in boxes since the 80s had mould on them, hopefully the collection doesn't have mould.
- abdulhaq 2y agoSadly, it's simple, you pay someone to come and dispose of it.
- actionfromafar 2y agoVHS tapes sell at easily more than $1 a pop. That's 50k dollars.
- ghaff 2y agoGood luck finding someone who will pay you $50K for cash and carry. The problem with a lot of old stuff is that it has value to someone. But finding that someone who will take it off your hands without much friction isn't easy.
- appendix-rock 2y agoDigitise, digitise, digitise!
- ghaff 2y agoTo what end? Digitizing is a huge amount of work.
- 2y ago
- pjc50 2y agoSo this is the "having stuff weighs you down thread", I guess tomorrow something people like will get deleted off streaming services and we'll have the "owning physical media is The Way" thread. The thing about archives is that it's never clear what will turn out to be important or valuable. You're buying and storing a pile of lottery tickets. Yes, they're probably worthless. But only probably. I suspect a lot of people's thinking is informed by the long saga of missing Doctor Who episodes, too. Edit: here's today's "keep forever" thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41665593 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41665593 Myself, I hoard in moderation and don't even have a home media server.
- metalman 2y agoA storyied ephemera shop "plan b",Halifax,ns was closing,and a 3/4" brodcast vhs machine was gifted to me,and much latter upon investigation revealed a tape inside,with "Doctor Who" and an episode that is too blurred to read Also have an ancient steel wire recorder with a role of wire,and going back even further a pair of wax drum dictaphone recorders with drums there are of course ,truely monsterous collections out there lurking with the epic storys known to just a few or perhaps only one disinterested guardian/custodian,and these will keep cropping up for centuries new motszart piece popped up recently was sitting on a shelf safe and sound for all this time
- latexr 2y agoCase in point: Marion Stokes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Stokes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Stokes https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/marion-stokes-television-news-archive https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/marion-stokes-televisi...
- longtimelistnr 2y agoa noted Philadelphia legend who also made a large fortune on early Apple stock! she's as close you can get to a modern folk tale
- andai 2y agoI've started saving web pages, since several of my favorite websites went offline, and some even self-deleted from WayBack Machine. The impression I get is that if I want something to continue existing, it's my responsibility to make that happen. On a darker note, this appears to be true of civilization in general...
- sim7c00 2y agoI used to collect many things, also on my pc in digital forms. then oneday my hard-drive just straigh-up died, no backups ofcourse the smart teenager i was. I was super sad, for like 1 hour, and re-installed and started 'clean'. That really felt like a big relief, and i got rid of all of my collections of useless stuff. loads of old pcs, laptops, tapes, cds, whatever. Ended up at somepoint only having a desktop, some speakers and a bed. now i have a little more again, but no collections, i just throw everything that's not usable to me anymore, or give it away if it might be usable to someone. feels great not having so much clutter and stuff around me anymore. real easy to clean the house too now :D
- david422 2y agoWhenever I upgrade computers, I never transfer, just start fresh. I keep old hard drives around and have backups in case I need stuff but... all that stuff I accumulate I don't actually need.
- loufe 2y agoThankfully my semi-hoarding of digital media takes up no space aside from on my server's hard drives and organizing is easy and pleasant. I definitely feel the pull to add to the collection. It's a sort of joy.
- ghaff 2y agoDigital hoarding can be obsessive in its own right. But, as you say, it doesn't take up space, doesn't cost much, and isn't a physical weight on you.
- varispeed 2y agoI sometimes buy random cassettes. I find listening to radio shows from the 80s quite relaxing and having different vibe.
- RajT88 2y agoA friend of mine (Japanese - relevant because the cost of music CD's was higher there) in high school would have side jobs so he could buy music. His mom - possibly undiagnosed mental health issues - every few years would throw away his CD collection which he'd spent the equivalent of 30-40k USD on. This happened twice. Me - I'm on the JellyFin bandwagon. This is less to archive everything (I have MDISC for the important stuff like my personal photos and documents and such) and more to just have my own streaming service type thing which works when the internet is down.
- PaulHoule 2y agoFor a while I was trying to gentle a feral cat in a room in my other house (rental property under renovation), I moved the XBOX and all my DVD/Blu-Ray discs there (unlike books, I'm not afraid of having any of these get sprayed on) -- for a weeks the house was a SCIF but pretty soon I set up one of these https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/all-wireless/products/litebeam-5ac https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/all-wireless/products/li... for the 70 ft or so gap between the houses. Over several months I played games and watched Jellyfin, Tubi and Apple TV but didn't watch a single disk. The move freed up a lot of space in the main house so I donated of about 2/3 of the discs (not going to watch Disney's Frozen again but it was hard to decide which cut of Superman II I wanted) to the reuse center. I got Bob B to eat treats with relish in the other house but once I moved him to the farmhouse he wedged himself into a corner and refused to acknowledge our other cats when they came around to greet him politely. He made a break for it the first chance he got although my wife has seen him lurking around our barn.