Over the last 2 years, I’ve noticed that I spend WAY more time carefully cataloguing my collections of digital media (games, anime) than actually experiencing those media.

I would spend months carefully renaming the files, grouping them into folders by franchise, creating watch order files, remuxing videos so they would only have one audio and one subtitle file, reencoding videos that I considered bloated, reencoding videos that had flac or 5.1 audio to opus stereo, putting all my files into a spreadsheet along with other information, etc. etc.

Today I realized that my obsession is pointless. I’m just wasting my life doing something that’s not enjoyable, instead of experiencing the media I’ve collected. Who am I making those neat-looking catalogues for? I will never pass on my collection to anyone. I am just lost in my unhealthy obsession instead of enjoying life.

So yeah. Today I’ve decided to stop wasting my time. I will keep archiving (because I believe that in the future, the governments will make it very difficult to share copyrighted media online), but I will stop trying to make my collection look nice and tidy.

I will also delete stuff that I’ve watched/played that I didn’t enjoy. I’ve come to a realization there’s no point archiving it if I’m never going to use it again.

Anyways, I hope this helps someone realize that obsessions with cataloguing your hoards are unhealthy and a waste of life.

  • TheRealKuthooloo@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    I spent like half a work day maybe 4 hours or so ensuring my collection of all the Futurama episodes were in order of production which I opted in for because its not really super serialized and it all turned out well, I then separated I believe season 4, 5 and 3 because season 5 was mostly produced for season 4 but some episodes were produced for season 3, then I spent the entire time watching it putting each episode into a tier list of about 7 categories ranging from best to worst with inbetween-ey emotions supplementing the other tiers, I still include a file for season 5 because it technically does exist but it really shouldn’t if we are going by my production date system.

    I also watched every Aqua Teen Hunger Force episode and separated all episodes which were unsuitable for my girlfriend into a separate folder which I put on a USB drive because I wanted to share with her something from my childhood even though she couldn’t watch a majority of the episodes (Blood makes her faint and needles and alot of the hyperviolent gags in that show. She loves meatwad though)

    I plan on doing the same tier list thing I did for Futurama but for Adventure Time(I expect a lot of heavy hitters) and maybe Steven Universe(I expect as much disappointment as when I first watched this show.), in short: I like making lists and compiling information.

    • InMooseWeTrust@alien.topBEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      (root directory)

      TV shows cartoon

      Futurama

      “Futurama Season 1” etc as zip files in store compression (to reduce the number of files)

      This way everything is simple and intuitive and I can just copy/unzip whatever I want to watch. Or if I want to give stuff away to other people, I can retrieve and copy everything very quickly. I’ve been doing this for years and it’s efficient without costing me a lot of my time.