As my longtime readers know, I love watching videos on YouTube. I enjoy streaming videos from it whether it’s from my Linux machines or even my Xbox console. I even went as far as becoming a YouTube Premium subscriber for the past many years by now, as I love watching videos on my living room TV without worrying about ad breaks. While I tolerate ad breaks on other streaming platforms, something about them being on YouTube feels more egregious, more annoying than when other platforms attempt to use them.
Regardless, I stumbled across an interesting YouTube video the other day by Cary The Snail. The video featured such an intriguing premise that I felt compelled to click and watch.
Essentially, this YouTuber built a wooden shelf and sought to only enjoy the media that fit inside of it for an entire month. Consequently, this experiment needed foresight to determine in advance what to consume and how to be more intentional about media consumption rather than simply enjoying whatever an algorithm recommends and streams to use nowadays.
While the video featured the conclusion I was generally expecting, that wasn’t enough for me. I wanted to dip my toes into a similar experiment. I was inspired to try something similar. However, I’m only going for two weeks instead of a month. Originally, I only planned for a week, but that seemed too easy. A month still seems more difficult, so I thought two weeks would be a reasonable middle ground.
The Criteria
We can’t just attempt something like this without setting a few ground rules. I used my Zettelkasten Obsidian system to write a few rules for myself in a designated place that I will always see them.
- All of the media I consume must fit within the box, which is roughly 12 x 12 x 13 inches in size.
- In case anybody’s wondering, it’s a “Brightroom” box my girlfriend and I purchased from Target three years ago.
- I will not stream anything from online services. At all. Even YouTube and Pluto TV are verboten.
- I will almost always stick with the media I physically own, whether it’s cartridges, disks, or books.
- TV and music outside of the box can only be consumed if it’s from an over-the-air TV antenna or FM radio. In other words, it has to be the old-school way of doing things.
- Digital-only media is not allowed. If I could just fall back on my old MP3 downloads or movies I downloaded years ago, this wouldn’t be difficult at all. It has to be something I tangibly own or it doesn’t count.
- If I wish to add something, such as something I found at a local shop or a library, it must fit inside of the box with everything else.
- If it doesn’t fit, I must take something else out to make it fit, but then I won’t be able to consume the removed media for the rest of the challenge anymore.
- Keep in mind I can still use computers and modern devices like a phone just fine. The caveat is no streaming from any of them. If I need to look something up like a recipe, basic how-to instructions, or my second brain, that’s perfectly fine. I just can’t watch a YouTube video or means of streaming media that shows me how to do something.
- In some remote cases, I may find myself exposed to streaming media through secondhand means. This won’t count, as I can’t control what music is played at a store, what the streaming video feed is played at a restaurant dining area, and so on.
Day 0: The Setup
Just like my other challenges, there’s a prep day to get the pieces in place. I had to select the media for my box. I looked at my physical media collection, still collecting some dust, and decided what to add to the box. My girlfriend initially showed interest in attempting this and added a few books to the box. However, once I told her more of the rules in detail, she lost interest and took her things out of the box, leaving some additional space for myself inside. Thus, I am now left with the following:
BOOKS
- An Adobe Photoshop CS5 tutorial book I picked up a few months ago used for 5 bucks
- A copy of Learn to Read in Japanese Vol. I by Roger Lake and Noriko Ura that I picked up a few months ago
- Two old back issues of the Batman and Grendel crossover by Matt Wagner
- The Usagi Yojimbo Saga: Vol. 1 by Stan Sakai, which was gifted to me a few years ago by my best friend
- Seventh Son and Red Prophet by Orson Scott Card, a book I usually take with me when called to jury duty or a doctor’s office
DVDs
- Dan-Doh!! The Super Shot!, an anime series I haven’t watched in over a decade now
- The Gokusen, one of my all-time favorite anime shows (even if the J-drama is better)
VIDEO GAMES
- Mario Party Superstars (Switch), a game I can play alone or with my girlfriend
- Bioshock (PS3), a game I wanted to revisit with my girlfriend since she’s a fan of horror
- Rare Replay (Xbox One), especially since I hadn’t played so many of the games since I bought it years ago
- Super Mario 3D World (Wii U), a copy I borrowed from a close friend years ago and forgot to give back (if you’re reading this, sorry)
- Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker (Wii U) (see above)
- NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams (Wii), a game I hadn’t played since the late 2000s, but recalled liking a lot
MUSIC (CDs)
- “The Audio Injected Soul” by Mnemic
- “Architect of Lies” by Mercenary
- “Kezia” by Protest The Hero
- “Wasteland Discotheque” by Raunchy
- “Death Pop Romance” by Raunchy
- “Time I” by Wintersun
- “Bedtime Prayers” by Blinded Colony
- “Awake” by Skillet
- “Glorious Collision” by Evergrey
With my media selected, I took the rest of my day to give a temporary goodbye to the streaming media I enjoy, such as my thousands of songs on TIDAL.
Day 1
I got up on an easy morning (read: a day off) expecting to start the challenge as I saw the box of media in the living room. I started working on making myself breakfast in the kitchen as normal. Usually, I’d throw something on from YouTube and sit on the living room sofa while watching whatever caught my fancy, but streaming media is off limits, so I had to be more mindful with silence when eating. Instead, I threw in the first disk of Dan-Doh!! The Super Shot! and watched the first episode with my girlfriend. I was tempted to turn on the English dub (it really wasn’t a bad dub from my recollection), but she insisted on turning on Japanese audio with English subs.
For those who watch anime, it feels a little strange seeing the type of subtitles that appear on DVD sets like this, most notably in the font sizing and style. Streaming media online has more appealing subtitles that can more easily be toggled and adjusted in a video player, although the ones here did the job well enough. It’s such a small difference, but the font was larger, the text opaque yellow with a black outline, and the letters were sometimes too close to the bottom of the screen.
Eventually, we had to stop watching and drive somewhere for a few errands. That meant I could’t just open up TIDAL and connect it to my sound system on the drive there. While the local rock station in my area is a lot better than the one where I used to live, they don’t always play things I like, so a CD looked more tempting.
Glancing at my CDs, I grabbed Wasteland Discotheque by Raunchy. I picked this CD intentionally. Back when I compared Spotify alternatives, I noticed that TIDAL didn’t have this album at all. Fast forward several months, and TIDAL still doesn’t have it. Consequently, it’s been a while since I last heard it.
Giving the album a listen on my drive was almost cathartic. I said it in that other post about Spotify alternatives, but the album is a serious nostalgia trip for me. In an instant, I was transported back to my senior year of high school and my freshman year of college, when I would listen to it nonstop.
When I had time to be a bit idle between writing things down or doing a few chores, I found myself either reading a book or trying to play video games. I cracked open Seventh Son and Red Prophet to get a good idea where I left off last time I had jury duty a few years ago, and I was able to really enjoy the world building Orson Scott Card puts together in his stories.
Additionally, I booted up Rare Replay and finally tried out Perfect Dark for the first time. Despite how old I was when it first dropped, I never played Perfect Dark back in the day, so I mistakenly assumed that institute at the start of the game was the main game mode instead of some sort of glorified tutorial. I had to perform a quick search to learn this, as I felt confused and bored wandering around the institute without an objective.
Once I didn’t really gel with Perfect Dark, I booted up NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams and played for a few hours longer than I expected. It’s not a perfect game by any means, but I still enjoyed the time I spent playing it on a whim. I hadn’t played it in over 15 years, and it was still sitting on my shelf all this time since I last completed it. Despite how much I still like it, I found myself trying to grind for “A” ranks in the game longer than I would have given myself credit for.
This was only the first day, and my day largely continued in a similar way. The only difference was I would avoid streaming any kind of media whenever possible. But the strangest part of everything? This was just regular life two decades ago. We didn’t have streaming media everywhere we looked back in those days. Going back two decades ago, in fact, YouTube was in its infancy. Two years after that, Netflix would branch out into streaming from their usual business of mailing DVDs. Needless to say, it’s a bit jarring to see how much everything has changed in just twenty years.
Later, I took some time to lift weights at my local gym, but I couldn’t listen to my music. Not having workout music made me realize how I take streaming music for granted. Of course, I could have taken a CD player with me, but that would require hunting one down first with a pair of good wired headphones. I haven’t owned a portable CD player since the mid-aughts, and it doesn’t seem worth it to buy one just for this experiment.
In the evening, my girlfriend and I went shopping a bit, and I spotted a physical book on discount: The Buy Nothing, Get Everything Plan by Liesl Clark and Rebecca Rockefeller. Seemed like a rather light nonfiction read to go alongside my comics, reference books, and novels. At the low price of $6, down from its MSRP of $16.99, it practically called to me for this challenge.
Day 2
After reading the aforementioned book late last night and earlier this morning, I’m only somewhat skeptical of it. Around 40 pages in, I was expecting more about saving money and making myself richer, but it’s less of that and more “kumbaya” stuff so far. Maybe it’ll pick up as I read and pull its weight with good ideas, but so far, I’m a tad weary of how critical it is of capitalism.
Aside from that, I came to another breakthrough since yesterday. I felt a bit anxious during the evening yesterday and this morning, but I finally realized what was causing it: my lack of YouTube. Only yesterday and today did I start to notice how often I use it, which at least vindicates how I pay for a Premium subscription. Oddly enough, when I wanted to watch something on YouTube yesterday morning, I only felt more inconvenienced rather than anxious. It feels as though I’m antsy over something that doesn’t make sense, or as if I don’t know the reason why.
Arriving at work, I had to pause myself before opening up TIDAL on my workplace MacBook Air. I couldn’t listen to TIDAL (again) because it was streaming, so my work continued in silence. But speaking of music, listening elsewhere wasn’t such a big deal. On my Arch system at home, I realized I still had an external CD/DVD drive that my Lenovo ThinkPad Carbon came with. I plugged the USB cable in, threw in my copy of “Glorious Collision” by Evergrey, and… wondered briefly how I would even play this on my computer.
It was only slightly awkward, but I had to go out of my way to install Rhythmbox for the first time in years. As much as it seemed like a relic of when a younger Mr. Hyde first tried Linux, Rhythmbox’s CD-playing capability served useful! Playing the CD was not only possible, but simple. Unfortunately, I wasn’t really in the mood to hear the album after hearing the first track, but later on, upon coming home, I played TIME I by Wintersun and had a much better time.
My girlfriend and I had to go to the grocery store in the evening to get a few things, and this was when I realized having a CD player in the car was surprisingly convenient compared to streaming music. Considering I have a rather standard stereo with an auxiliary jack and adapter for my Pixel 9, I normally have to plug in the phone, open TIDAL, select the playlist, play, and then drive. But now with physical media? The CD remembers where I left off. I just hop in and the song picks back up where I last was. No need to even decide what to play.
I wish I could go back to rewatch the YouTube video I linked to earlier in this post at the time I draft this, but I recall him mentioning how he picked only a couple of albums. As one may notice, I threw a good handful of albums in because my streaming selection of music is typically over +6,000 songs. I wanted to cast a larger net, even if it came at the possible cost of other books or DVDs I could have put in.
Day 3
I had another anxious morning not having my “fix” of YouTube. I had everything in place, I was more productive at getting things done, yet I still felt uneasy without being able to simply make myself breakfast and watch a video of my choosing on YouTube. As the morning went on, I was anxious with free time, yet everything was okay once I finally got work done. Despite my newfound absence of music, I was doing okay. I wouldn’t have expected such a thing on the first few days. Despite that, the idea of bringing my CD drive to the workplace seemed inconvenient as well.
Speaking of, convenience is a huge matter in this whole thing. While physical media can be cumbersome compared to its streaming counterpart, it’s still tangible, something we rightfully paid for. While streaming can also be convenient, it can still be a massive pain when we go searching for a show or film only to discover it’s on one service we don’t have. Then we have to weigh out if it’s even worth subscribing or getting a trial account for the service that does. Worse yet, there’s the fragmentation of a few seasons on one service with another few seasons on a different one. Worse still, there’s a long-running movie series where a streaming service only has the first, third, and sixth movie for whatever reason, then you discover that the fourth and fifth are on a different service you don’t have, and the second is just inexplicably not on any streaming service, so you end up having to buy the DVD or Blu-Ray copy anyway.
The point I’m trying to make here is this: As inconvenient as physical media can be, we need to keep it alive as an option. Streaming services won’t always be enough. This experiment, thus far, has made me think. While I’m not crazy about changing a CD to hear a different artist or switching DVDs to watch more episodes of a show, streaming still wins with so many people for its convenience factor alone. The friction from physical media, as insignificant as it may seem, is gone entirely. We have a more seamless experience, sure, but at what cost? We don’t own most, it not any, of the media we buy anymore, and the sad part is that so many people are complacent, complicit with this. Shows, movies, video games, music, books: None of our entertainment and knowledge are safe. I recall a year ago how some blowhard at Ubisoft said that consumers needed to “get comfortable with not owning (their) games.” Fortunately, as I write this, Ubisoft now must get comfortable not owning anybody’s money.
After coming home from work today, I sat in front of the TV to watch Dan-Doh!! The Super Shot! from its DVD box set. Funny enough, this is an anime I last purchased from Suncoast and watched in 2009, shortly before said Suncoast closed its doors for good. I don’t know what’s more surprising: the fact that I held onto the box set this long, or the fact that I never went back to rewatch it until now.
By this point, however, my girlfriend lost interest in watching the anime with me, so I switched it back to English voices. While I still love the English voices, I was hit by the sad realization that the audio mixing was far worse than I remember. The voices get drowned out by the background music and sound effects too easily, prompting me to switch back to Japanese with English subs. I’m not 100% sure if this esoteric anime, should it be streaming anywhere, suffers from this audio issue or if the DVD release was simply botched. Guess I can’t win them all.
Later that evening, I was in the mood to play a video game, so I started up Rare Replay again to pick up where I last left off on Conker’s Bad Fur Day several years ago. I had dropped the game in an underwater section that just wasn’t any fun to play through, and I was able to see why I gave up back then. I searched online for a possible hint on what to do, but stopped myself when realizing I couldn’t simply find a longplay YouTube video to guide me. Instead, I had to find a text-based walkthrough on Game-FAQs. The walkthrough I found also served to confuse me, telling me to find yellow or blue tunnels, then I’d look in-game and find no such thing. Eventually, I slogged through this section and made it to an interesting part of the game again.
Day 4
As part of my 5 AM Club routine, I went to my gym early to get some lifting done, but had no TIDAL streaming music to enjoy. Thus, I had to complete my sets with the sound of silence once again. Thankfully, nobody else was really up at this hour to blare their own music on a speaker.
I think this morning marked when I was over the proverbial “hump” of needing something to passively watch while eating breakfast. Instead, I simply ate my food, got ready for work, and arrived earlier than usual. No distractions and no streaming.
Aside from that, I did continue to read The Buy Nothing, Get Everything Plan. It’s still a light read and all, although I look forward more to the parts I know are in the book, the ones where the book demonstrates how to turn discarded or old things into different items entirely. This resourcefulness is what originally drew me in to buying the book in the first place, after all. Still, a lot of the other messaging in it is a bit off-putting to me, so perhaps it’s not a book meant for me. Maybe my girlfriend will like it more?
Other than that, I found the selection of music I had getting a bit stale. I didn’t mention this at the start, but I do have a vinyl disk collection I started six years ago. Unfortunately, I didn’t add any of them to my shelf the first day. It’s not because of limited space in the box, as I did confirm a vinyl record would easily fit inside. The real reason I added no vinyl records was because of my move this past summer. I had to leave a lot of things back home with my parents, including the actual turntable I once used to play these records.
But then, as I cleaned through the closet, I was struck with a realization: Don’t some vinyl records bundle a CD copy of the same album?
After digging through my music, lo and behold, I found a copy of “Home” by The Offering on CD tucked inside the vinyl copy’s sleeve. How appropriate that the first vinyl record I ever bought, the one that inspired me to start collecting vinyl in the first place, had a CD copy stowed away that I had nearly all but forgotten? I recalled scoffing at discovering the CD years ago, thinking it was useless when I had ordered the album in a clearly superior format. If I wanted the CD, I thought, why wouldn’t I just buy the CD on its own?
Fast forward to now, and I am so glad it’s here! I gave it a listen on Rhythmbox straight from CD and felt like I had a little more to listen to than before. It’s a much-appreciated feeling after only listening to three albums in the past several days. Going from over 6,000 songs on a streaming service to just three physical albums makes me feel like I’m on a music diet. While I do like owning my media, music included, I usually do feel like music streaming offers the best convenience trade-off compared to dealing with streaming movies or shows.
Something else I realized, as I went through my vinyl records, was how nice they feel, how much extra effort they have put into their packaging and presentation. I’m almost hard-pressed to think of many music CDs that have textured covers, pop-up images, colored surfaces, and other interesting visual details. I can think of a few CDs, certainly, but it’s impossible to think of any streaming examples.
Aside from that, this whole matter of a modern vinyl release reminded me of something that I used to see more often in physical media. Back when most of the world was still trying to transition from DVD to Blu-Ray, I remembered seeing promotions for major films being released in Blu-Ray/DVD bundles, where you got the same movie on both formats. I recalled seeing these promoted in the late aughts and thinking they were pointless. After all, if you bought a Blu-Ray disc, why would you want a DVD copy too? It took a few days or weeks later for me to think that this sort of bundle was really more of a pro-consumer move, offering both options at a convenient price. It became convenient to play the film in more places (even two places at once just because you could!) while still physically owning it.
After a few quick searches, I discovered why this isn’t really a “thing” anymore. Apparently, a few companies stopped selling Blu-Ray/DVD bundles because consumers were allegedly trying to declutter and make more space in their homes. While this might be true, it still sounds like such a convenient excuse, especially in a world where entertainment conglomerates want us to own less of what we purchase.
Day 5
I was less anxious in the morning, leading me to believe that the hardest part was over. While I may not be streaming any media whatsoever, my girlfriend still can. I did mention previously that she opted out when hearing about the conditions. The reason I bring this up at all is because she has had more free reign with the living room TV if I’m not playing a disc-based game or watching a DVD.
As I was getting ready for work, she called to me from the living room and said that they were playing “that stupid Disney commercial again.” I knew which one it was instantly. A few months ago, when we were streaming more often on Pluto TV close to Christmas time, the commercial kept airing and repeating, leading us to dislike it for how often it appeared. Regardless, it at least made sense to air it on Pluto TV, a free service that is ad-supported.
But what excuse do the big players have in the streaming game? Netflix, Hulu, Disney, and other major platforms switched from having straightforward plans to tiered pricing. Cheaper plans offer commercials, which perplexes me. If we’re already paying for a streaming service, why do we need ads at all? The idea of making the barrier for entry cheaper only makes some sense if the cost of streaming does go up. Still, isn’t this what we were trying to get away from? Instead of cutting the cord, we’re now back to the same old, same old with extra steps.
Other than that, I read more of the Buy Nothing book and finally reached a more promising chapter, which lists possible ways to reuse things in order to avoid buying more. It also featured some interesting things to stop buying and alternatives to buying them. Not all of them were winners (I’m skeptical when people suggest using something benign like white vinegar as a household cleaner), but some were good enough to take note of in my second brain.
Something else that strikes me as I write today is how little I seem to consume media outside of streaming. When I go to a site like YouTube, the algorithm has gotten so good that I can usually trust it with suggestions on what it thinks I may like. As a result, I would simply spend more time on it than any other streaming site. With that no longer an option, I gave myself a hefty selection of physical media to consume or revisit in my box. Despite that, I only feel like I’m starving on music, and I have a relatively good amount of music inside of my box to begin with. Despite all of the other media I’ve placed inside, so far, I’ve only actually consumed:
- Two books, one of which I bought on sale after starting this challenge.
- One anime DVD series that I still haven’t finished revisiting.
- Two video game discs.
- One of the discs (Rare Replay) is a compilation, I know, but I’ve only played two games within that compilation to begin with.
- Four music CDs, one of which I realized was secretly hidden inside of the sleeve of my vinyl copy of the same album.
Looking back, I was initially worried I wouldn’t have enough media in the box, but now I’m starting to think otherwise. It feels more now like I put too much into it. If anything else, my biggest takeaway today is that I consume less media overall when I’m at least a bit more intentional about it. Abstaining from streaming has made me realize how much I actually consume in the first place.
Later in the evening, I watched a few more episodes of Dan-Doh!! before heading to my Arch system to listen to “Home” by The Offering again. While I do love Wasteland Discotheque, I think I’m going to rotate the CD out tomorrow morning when I have a chance to put a different album in.
Before bed, I decided to read my woefully underused copy of Learn to Read in Japanese. I didn’t get very far into chapter two, but I am remembering why it took me some time to read this. Much like this entire experiment, reading this book is a very intentional thing. I have to be in the mindset to go through it slowly and deliberately in order to understand the sentences and Kanji within.
Day 6
While I’m already six days in, I still have an issue with my girlfriend forgetting about my challenge. Every so often, she’ll watch a clip on YouTube, she’ll want to show it to me, and I’ll have to insist that I can’t watch it because I can’t stream any media.
Still, I just went without any media in the morning this time. I didn’t even bother loading up the CD drive to listen to something. I found myself more focused on taking some notes from the Buy Nothing book on things I’m interested in not buying ever again. I’ve also noticed over the past few days that I’ll occasionally have a craving to hear a particular song. I’ve been itching to listen to Volbeat again, but I don’t own any of their physical albums. I really want to hear some Five Finger Death Punch, but I only have them on vinyl. If I’m really dying to hear them, I either have them on vinyl or not at all. As annoying as these cravings for specific artists and songs are, they usually pass.
Once I was finished with work, I watched more of the Dan-Doh!! DVD box set (I’m on the third disk at this point) and had a reasonable amount of fun. Still, I didn’t want to finish it too quickly, so I loaded up Rare Replay again to return to Conker’s Bad Fur Day. While playing it, however, I ran into annoyingly difficult segments. I had played the game forever ago and beaten it on the original N64 hardware, yet I was having such a difficult time playing it again now. I reached point where I had so many Game Over sequences from repeat deaths. Still, while the repeat deaths did annoy me, they didn’t annoy me enough into quitting. I kept trying until I proceeded further along in the story.
The reason I mention this at all is because I last played this game when streaming services were hardly commonplace. It’s almost as if the added convenience made me notice inconveniences more because they are less common now? Maybe I’m grasping straws on this one. Other than that, I don’t have a lot else to report on for this day other than how I went back to playing NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams for a short while.
Day 7
Another morning, another quiet workout routine. I really do miss having music to listen to while lifting weights, although I don’t think it makes sense to buy a portable CD player or boombox (Anyone else remember boomboxes?) when I have only a week remaining on this challenge.
However, I have noticed another benefit from starting this entire endeavor: I’m reading a lot more than I used to! It’s become a bit of a habit for me to read through a physical book in the morning. I didn’t really discuss it as much on previous days, but I do own an e-reader. As a result of this challenge, however, I have been avoiding the use of it because I do have a lot of physical books in my backlog. It’s difficult because I was in the middle of a couple of good books on the device before I dropped streaming media.
Recalling how I abstained from digital media also drew attention to how I have so many downloaded games I haven’t really gone through playing as well. It feels like the jokes about Steam sales are true, where people stock up on cheap games they might want to play on a rainy day… only to wind up with a massive, unplayed backlog.
But besides that, I feel like I have progressively less to report on so far. Thankfully, I haven’t had any painful urges to check out my subscription feed or home page on YouTube lately.
Day 8
Barely anything to do with media considering I was busy most of the day. If it wasn’t for a specific project I’m working on within my second brain (more on that in a future post), it was myself being out with my girlfriend running a few errands here and there. I suppose being too busy to stop and rest made it easy to not think about what media I was consuming for the most part.
One thing I will say is that I changed the CD in my car from “Wasteland Discotheque” by Raunchy to “Home” by The Offering. Now driving around feels a little less stale with a new set of tracks playing.
Another nice thing that happened was when we donated a few things to our local Goodwill. Since we were in the area, why not stop by inside to look around? Initially, I hoped to find a used record player to play my vinyls at a good price.
While I found no such thing, we looked around at the DVDs for a bit. My girlfriend lit up upon seeing 13 Going on 30 and Memoirs of a Geisha, two movies we had seen before together at various points. Priced at just $2 per DVD, it was hard to resist. We snagged both and took them home with plans to watch at least one in the evening a day or two later.
Day 9
Another day off, and more work on my aforementioned project. However, I would be lying if I said I weren’t the least bit tempted to launch TIDAL and listen to a few songs. After mentioning them a few days prior, I’m still having a few cravings to hear artists outside my physical media library.
Still, looking over my CDs made me recall a memory I had nearly forgotten: Back when I drove my first car, a beater manufactured in the late 90’s, I had no aux cable port. That meant no plugging in my phone or even so much as an iPod. I got by listening to CDs, which was why I had amassed this collection.
Regardless, here’s the sort of weird part: I didn’t want to risk my CDs being stolen or damaged in the car, so I would rip a copy on my laptop at the time, burn a CD copy, and then let that sit inside the CD player for weeks at a time. As a result, it seemed more as if I didn’t appreciate the physical CDs I had purchased, like I was afraid I would scuff them, scratch them, drop them, or whatever else when handling them in the car.
But with this whole endeavor, I’m actually using the master discs. If I don’t use them now, when else will I actually use them? Isn’t that the whole point? Perhaps this entire exercise has made me realize that I should appreciate the physical media I buy, not admire it on a shelf.
This also extends beyond just my music CDs. I’ve hesitated to mark up useful nonfiction texts when it would have been beneficial to add highlights or annotations. It’s all part of thinking it would be nicer to have the books in great condition. Same with notebooks I own. I used to buy really nice-looking ones, but I would hesitate to write in them because I thought I would “ruin” them.
I got over the issue with the notebooks, but it took me a few years before I did that. It’s a little liberating to take a CD into the car and not feel so preoccupied over whether it’s going to stay in pristine condition or not, too.
But aside from that, my girlfriend and I went to our local mall today. I had to meet with someone on Zoom something work related in the afternoon, so we went in the morning to her scheduled eye exam. After getting those matters sorted, we had a small amount of extra time to browse the music store in our mall.
My hope was to browse the used CDs and find a cheap album or two to snag for this challenge. Unfortunately, everything was alphabetical instead of separated by genre, and the only vaguely interesting CD I found was “Next” by Sevendust. Decent, but not my favorite from the group, so I left empty-handed with my time to get back running out.
Later in the evening, both of us decided to watch the aforementioned 13 Going on 30 DVD we bought at Goodwill. But as we watched, I realized something great: When we wanted to watch the movie, all we had to do was put the DVD in. That was it.
Compare that to before, if we wanted to watch the movie without the physical copy, my girlfriend would have to waste time going to DuckDuckGo (yes, I got her to switch) and type “where to watch 13 going on 30 streaming.” We’d then cross our fingers and hope that the services we subscribed to (or shared passwords on) had the film. Bonus points if it said Amazon had it, then we logged in to discovered it was only to rent or buy, not to stream free on Prime.
The best part now is that we never have to search for this again as long as we own the DVD. If we ever feel like watching it again for a movie night in, all we need to do is pop the DVD into the living room PS3. No being blindsided by finding out it’s on a different streaming service from last time. Of course, I made sure the DVD, complete with case, fit in the main box of physical media, so there it will stay as a part of this challenge.
Day 10
The end is in sight. Still, I won’t lie: I was tempted several times during this challenge to give up at various points for one reason or another. It was another quiet day of work, for instance, but I was already used to not having music playing by this point. Whether this really affected my productivity, for better or for worse, I still can’t really say. It’s funny because I think something more like a podcast or a straight-up video with visual content would have been more likely to affect my output.
With an unexpected abundance of time in the afternoon, I found myself reading again, but this time, I read through some of the comics I had tucked away into the media box. It dawned on me how I had put these comics in only to neglect since then. If they were going to be in there, I might as well read them, right? I mostly started with Usagi Yojimbo and read through a few pages, although I stopped because it’s not necessarily from the beginning in this volume. Instead, it starts on “Shades of Green,” which is a cool chapter from the series at the very least.
Still, after all of this, I had forgotten to mention something else about the movie my girlfriend and I were watching. Since we had to go to sleep early last night, we didn’t get to finish the film 13 Going on 30, so we made plans to come back and finish it this evening. However, I had run into an unexpected problem: The living room PS3 would not read the disc. I hadn’t mentioned it a few days ago, but the same happened with one of the Dan-Doh!! discs. I started to wonder if my PS3 wasn’t working, so I tested the copy of Memoirs of a Geisha alongside a Blu-Ray copy of Wild Hogs. (For clarity, I did not hit play on either disc. I just wanted to see if the console would detect them.) They both were detected just fine, yet 13 Going on 30, still wasn’t detected.
We got it to work eventually after I tried spraying the DVD with a bit of screen cleaner and wiping it with a microfiber cloth. Despite how much I went on about how physical media is meant to be used, we need to take care of it, too. This is one of the few places where streaming does really trump physical. Back in the day, when Netflix mailed DVDs, it was possible to scratch those discs. Nobody ever “scratched” a Netflix stream!
Something else that seemed strange to us occurred when we watched the DVD in question. My girlfriend commented how the movie didn’t look visually good. That was when I remembered we were watching on DVD instead of Blu-Ray or streaming. I suppose the commonplace nature of streaming has made 1080P and higher streaming normalized. Comparatively, it’s easier to notice how grainy or blurry the DVD copy of the film looked. We had both seen it on a date night together several years ago via streaming, and I was seeing the difference as well.
I guess next time we hunt down a movie we know we’ll want to revisit, we should see if it’s on Blu-Ray instead. Despite that, it’s hard to compete with the low, low price we paid at our local Goodwill.
Day 11
I finally finished the “Buy Nothing” book, although I found myself merely skimming through by the last few chapters just to finish it much faster. Honestly, I was mentally checked-out by the end. It wasn’t really my thing, although I can at least see myself going back to the third chapter in the future for a reference to things I can make myself instead of having to buy elsewhere. This is one of the few chapters that interests me due to how I merely want to keep money in my wallet where possible, and I did look forward to at least not having to buy vegetable stock ever again.
As my work day progressed, everything was fine for the most part. But a strange feeling came along once I got home.
I really craved watching some YouTube again.
Keep in mind, I still had urges to watch YouTube again here or there, especially at the start of the challenge. However, now that my goal of 14 days is finally in sight, it feels like a part of me wants to just end the whole experiment prematurely. Still, I’ve recalled just how long it has been. I’m almost done; I’ve come so far. Why not finish at this point?
However, I’m still finding myself making a meal and wanting to watch something even this far into the challenge. Reaching for a DVD takes more effort than I’d like just for this, too. I was doing this during the first week with Dan-Doh!! on DVD, but now I just haven’t bothered watching anything when having a meal at home. I only wish it were easier to read a physical book while eating. While I do have audiobooks, I only have them on an old Audible account collecting dust, so no physical media. It doesn’t count, unfortunately.
After a particularly busy and rough work day, I finally opened up the first issue of the Batman and Grendel crossover, an old back-issue I bought years and years ago from a comic shop for $15. Reading through the beginning was a bit dense and a little hard to follow at first, as the story follows four characters simultaneously, but it started to come together toward the middle.
Aside from that about the comic, the fact that it was sealed in one of those comic book plastic pouches made me hesitant to open it. Even after drawing it out, the pages were a bit stiff. I was overly self-conscious about how I held the comic as well, trying to take care as to not damage the paper or pages. It makes sense considering the comic is almost as old as I am. Still, this echoes what I realized yesterday: Physical media is meant to be enjoyed, though we still need to take care of it if we expect to keep using it. When it was time to go to bed, I took care slipping the comic back into its protective sleeve.
Day 12
Another quiet morning without YouTube, another day without streaming music. Still, I should at least be grateful that I can listen to CDs that I still have. “Home” by The Offering has still been a great listen in the car. For those unacquainted with the band, one of their best songs on the album (Ultraviolence) sounds like if Rob Halford fronted Slipknot. I say this with no irony.
I continued watching the Dan-Doh!! anime series on DVD throughout parts of the day when I had time. I made it to the last two discs of the series, and the show has been a bit better than I remembered. I did at least find myself paying more attention to it, watching it more consciously. That reminded me of how I last heard a few months ago about YouTubers complaining that there was a supposed tidal wave of “slop” on the platform. When I had looked into it, I found it a bit embarrassing to admit to myself that a few of those channels and videos that were identified in this category were some of the things I’d watch from time-to-time.
The reason I admit to something so embarrassing like this is because these were the perfect videos I’d play in the background while eating something or passively doing something else. Now that I haven’t had these videos to simply play, I feel like I have to pay closer attention to the media I consume in this regard.
The alternative, if I have no physical media to consume, is to simply eat without watching or listening to anything. I find it almost alienating that this feels like such a foreign concept now; it was perfectly normal 20 years ago to just eat a meal without streaming media in the background. Then again, I suppose the closest equivalent was somebody just leaving the TV on a random channel back in those days, so who knows?
Day 13
I had been distracted by a somewhat annoying (but ultimately minor) issue early in the morning. As a result, I was up in the morning without thinking about streaming media in the slightest. It was only later throughout the day and after work that it crossed my mind again.
Once the evening was here, I wanted to kick back with my girlfriend and play Mario Party Superstars for the first time in a while. I got our Switch set up with our controllers and everything. However, she told me she wasn’t feeling it, so I was back to watching the Dan-Doh!! DVDs. I’m on the last two discs of the series right now, and I’m still not sure why I never came back to revisit this show despite having owned it on DVD for ages now.
Something else I tried, albeit briefly, was using our over-the-air antenna for the first time in months. I originally bought this to keep up with sports, but found myself letting it collect dust largely because it’s a tad inconvenient to switch my TV’s input to it. That, and blackout restrictions, but that’s beside the point. It’s like that lack of convenience makes it less compelling than using the DVDs I have. Such a strange thing considering that DVDs and physical media, while compelling enough for their own reasons, are ultimately less convenient than streaming.
Day 14
The final day has finally come. Despite everything, I still have quite a bit of media in my box that I haven’t consumed. I largely think this is because I have so much going on at the workplace that I don’t get to simply consume media as freely as I once did when I was finishing high school, starting college, or only working a part-time job.
That said, this looked like the best time to take inventory of what media I consumed versus what I didn’t touch from the box.
| What I Consumed | What I Ignored |
|---|---|
| NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams (Wii) | Bioshock (PS3) |
| Rare Replay (XB1) | Valkyria Chronicles (PS3) |
| Mario Party Superstars (Switch) | Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker (Wii U) |
| The Buy Nothing, Get Everything Plan | Super Mario World 3D (Wii U) |
| The Usagi Yojimbo Saga: Vol 1 | The second issue of the Batman/Grendel crossover |
| The first issue of the Batman/Grendel crossover | The Adobe Photoshop CS5 tutorial book with a bundled disc |
| Seventh Son and Red Prophet | “Awake” by Skillet |
| “TIME I” by Wintersun | “Bedtime Prayers” by Blinded Colony |
| “Glorious Collision” by Evergrey | “Death Pop Romance” by Raunchy |
| “Wasteland Discotheque” by Raunchy | “Kezia” by Protest The Hero |
| “Home” by The Offering on CD | “Architect of Lies” by Mercenary |
| Dan-Doh!! The Super Shot! (complete series on DVD) | “The Audio-Injected Soul” by Mnemic |
| 13 Going on 30 on DVD | “Home” by The Offering on vinyl |
| Learn to Read in Japanese | Gokusen (complete anime series on DVD) |
You know, looking at these side-by-side, I realized I consumed more than I would have guessed firsthand. It felt like I was always dabbling into a small amount of the media in the box, but now that I look at everything right in front of me, I probably overdid it with the amount of media I picked.
Something else that surprised me was how much music I tucked away in the box… only to listen to a few CDs at most. I think what happened here was how I built my initial CD collection a few years before the 2010s started. It’s music I either already listened to so often that I burned myself out on it, or music that is more dated to a specific time for me. If I had myself a record player for this challenge, the music I played would have been albums I bought in 2019 and onward, reflecting my current taste more closely than my CD collection does.
Additionally, I’m used to one of streaming music’s best features: endlessly customizable playlists. I don’t usually play one album on loop these days. Rather, I like to curate large playlists with lots of tracks here and there. Listening on CD takes some of that freedom away.
I’m also still struggling with tsundoku, the phenomenon where one buys more books to add to an endlessly-growing backlog without having the time to read through all of them. For instance, it may have looked puzzling for me to have a tutorial book on Adobe Photoshop CS5, but I bought it at a low price on a rainy day because I actually bought Photoshop CS5 for 90% off ages ago. CS6 came along soon after before Adobe went subscription-only, so maybe this wasn’t such a bad purchase in the long run. Still, the inconvenience of booting into Windows just to run it is the biggest culprit as to why I didn’t bother with looking into this textbook and course during my whole endeavor.
What I Learned From This Challenge
When I decided to attempt this experiment, I honestly expected a completely different outcome. I almost expected to simply have a few of the same views as the aforementioned YouTube video from Cary The Snail but with maybe one or two other ideas or additional insights here or there.
In reality, I see things differently as a result. I learned a few of the following lessons from this challenge:
- I was hooked on YouTube at some point. My first few days of abstaining from YouTube made me realize it. I experienced withdrawal symptoms like anxiety. However, those feelings eventually passed and it became the norm for me to not watch YouTube so often.
- I really do listen to a lot of music. Sticking with only physical media made me realize how little I actually have to listen to that isn’t available as streaming or a digital copy.
- Regardless of how inconvenient physical media can be, it must survive. We live in a world where companies increasingly push us into paying for media that we don’t own.
- YouTube is immensely useful for looking up how to do things. Otherwise, we have to read instructions that hopefully include some pictures as we hope we’re doing things right.
- It turns out that some vinyl albums include a bundled CD copy! This made the challenge a bit easier for me, especially since the vinyl copies could also fit into the box.
- Physical media can include visual and sensory details that make it feel rewarding to own the product, to support the creators of it. I would go as far as saying this is an underappreciated aspect of buying physical copies of music albums, movies, TV shows, and more.
- Multiple streaming services decided to start streaming ads on cheaper plans, which almost makes streaming shows and TV pointless. Back in the day, the biggest appeal of Netflix used to be how there were no ads because you paid for it. Now it feels like we’ve circled back to streaming being cable TV with extra steps.
- With streaming and non-physical media cut from the equation, I realize I consume a lot less media than I expected (sans music).
- If I’m a little too busy, I don’t think about media to consume so much as I think about getting things done.
- Physical media is meant to be enjoyed, not collecting dust in our closets or on our shelves. Same with other various things such as notebooks.
- Of course, physical media should be taken care of if we expect to keep revisiting it. This is one of the big advantages of streaming other than sheer convenience.
- It’s liberating to own some physical media if we expect to revisit it at some point in the future. If you feel like watching it, just grab the disc and play. No need to search online to hope that it hasn’t left the streaming service you last saw it on.
- DVDs for non-animated films usually don’t look as great as we remembered. If high-fidelity picture matters to you, Blu-Ray should be your first option, because DVDs don’t look as sharp as we might have remembered.
- One of my favorite features of streaming music is how I can sync playlists of my specifications and choosing to any of my devices.
What’s Next?
I’ll be brutally honest. Now that I’ve finished this challenge, one of the first things I plan to do is open up YouTube and see what I missed. I may have been addicted to it before, but I still want to get some viewing done. Now that I have a backlog of videos to consider before opening the site again, I wonder how I’m going to approach this? Am I going to try to make up for lost time and watch all of the videos uploaded by my favorite channels, or am I going to simply watch the latest content?
I’m also planning on diving head-first into my TIDAL account. I missed being able to listen to any of my playlists whenever I wanted at high-fidelity audio.
Additionally, I haven’t mentioned it much, but I’ve been itching to read e-books again. I was in the middle of a great productivity book (which may likely be the next entry in an upcoming Sudo Science Book Club), and I had tons of notes on it in my bullet journal until I started this challenge. Now I’m going to dive right back in to continue the notes I last took two weeks ago.
Would You Try This Again?
I know I started a few other challenges on my site, where I attempted to do one thing or another for X-amount of time to see what happens, such as that time I switched to an Android-powered “dumbphone.”
But with this? I actually don’t regret this one! I would be willing to give this another shot in the future. This was an interesting exercise that helped me realize several things about the media I consume, whether passively or intentionally. I might be inclined to try something similar again next year, albeit I’ll likely change some of the criteria. Maybe I’ll set it to a shorter amount of time like a week after all, but as a trade-off, I’ll pick less media or put everything into a smaller container like a shoe box.
What About You?
Have you ever thought about the media you consume? How much or the method of consuming it? Did my experience get you to think about this a little differently? Would you attempt a similar experiment? Let me know in your comments below. I’d love to know what you think.
Sudo Science 