Rolling Death Of Physical Media

I envy those of you who live close to a good record store. We haven’t had one in this immediate area in a long time. (Baltimore does, but that’s a bit of a drive.)

We do have a great independent bookstore a few miles away, though.

the B&N stores here are blehhh. huge and boring. MID as the kids would say. their fiction/lit sections suck so bad. same with their SF sections. but there are awesome bookstores around here so no real reason to go to those places. awesome for me anyway. Grey Matter Books in Hadley rules. Author Kelly Link has the awesome and impeccably curated Book Moon Bookstore in Easthampton. the newly opened Unnameable Books in Turners Falls. He has a shop in Brooklyn as well. Great for hipster new stuff. i don't look for new records. a good new DVD selection outside of B&N would be more challenging to find. Maybe Newbury Comics in Northampton but i haven't been there in years. i had a good hookup for DVDs for a long time. now i just have to watch them all. my best friend from high school has a website devoted to horror movies and he told me that he had been collecting VHS and DVD his whole life and now he was just going to watch them all! that's how i feel. but i understand the criterion/niche addiction.

Grey Matter is the best used bookstore in North America

if I lived in that part of the world i would be in there every day

Being in SF, I have reasonably good choices around re book and record stores so not complaining here (and yes to used CD scarfing up and not worrying about sound quality as compared to vinyl -- which was the whole point to start with!).

Building on Scott's point in re streaming options, besides getting Kanopy via my (academic) employer, I subscribe to a LOT of them, but nearly all of them on a yearly basis with renewals spaced throughout the year so that way it doesn't feel like I'm being nickel and dimed (a psychological move obv, but there's also light discounts going that route; basically everything is something I pay for via my freelance writing so it all works out). The exceptions to going yearly would be Netflix and Disney+/Hulu and I absolutely would go yearly on those if I could. I think strictly speaking I can with the Disney/Hulu bundle but I would have to get ads annnnnnnd no. (Everywhere possible I kill out ads, and that's probably why I don't do Tubi or the like as much, though I'm glad they're there.) YouTube Premium I need to finally go yearly on here soon, Max I get for free almost as a legacy from the AT&T days (they're my cell provider) and Peacock I get on a reduced rate due to Comcast handling my Internet, I pay more to get rid of the ads as noted. Beyond that, offhand: Criterion, MUBI and Kino for the cinephile itch, then Apple+, Paramount+/Showtime, Prime, Britbox, AMC+, Starz, Nebula plus the bespoke WOW Presents Plus, MST3K and Rifftrax apps. Do I watch everything on them? Of course not! But nine times out of ten it means if something is recommended I have access, and in a handy turn of events, almost everything I care about in terms of sports (cycling, soccer/football, the Olympics in general) is picked up one way or another by the services I already have. Won't complain.

The Barnes & Noble in downtown Seattle was replaced by three empty floors for three years, then a pop-up Friends merch store, then empty floors for a year, then a pop-up Stranger Things merch store. (There’s one about 50 minutes away, but it sucks, and half that travel time is walking through three parking lots for a former shopping mall that is now partially something ice hockey.)

and didn't get far. i left them with the cavemen and daleks

Cavemen are episodes 2-4, daleks are eps 6-11. You couldn’t have made it much further anyway, as eps 14-20 (with Marco Polo) are missing, but 12-13 is a good little spooky locked-room spaceship mystery.

Tubi is vastly overrated for movies if you have Kanopy.

Most libraries only allow patrons about five movies or episodes or shorts a months on Kanopy, aiui.

(Ours has recently changed from a flat five to some kind of impenetrable metered credit system.)

Seeing that list of streaming subscriptions Ned posted makes my head hurt.

I'm one of the laziest streaming subscribers you imagine. I have Prime because I signed on for the Prime shipping plan like 10 years ago. I have Netflix because I signed on for the disc service 18 years ago. The Hulu I have I got through Spotify when I upgraded to Premium five years ago. I'm only on Max now because my best friend & her husband added me as a fourth on their account they get through their cable provider. In alot of ways this is more than enough for me. It's surprising how quickly a lot of content round robins between those four companies.

I've meant to sign on to Criterion and/Mubi, but it seems like I never have the funds available when they offer their best deals (probably because of all my other streaming expenses lol).

I have Kanopy through my library, and Hulu and Netflix because a friend offered the hookup. Beyond that, well, there’s cable, library DVDs, and the movie theater. It means I don’t see everything, but there’s so much available to see!

(And my relatively small personal DVD library.)

Unnameable Books in Turners Falls. He has a shop in Brooklyn as well

Funny, this is probably my least favorite shop and it's so close to me. It's a damn shame. The staff aren't exactly rude, but not friendly or helpful like so many other local booksellers are. And they're one of those stores that treats it;'s genre fiction sections like dumping grounds. Anything of arbitrary literary quality will be filed in LITERATURE (i.e. Simenon, Chandler) while they leave the mystery section to airport thrillers and things they consider uhhhh.. lesser. Really no other way for me to read it tbh. I think a lot of stores sometimes mistakenly file a crime novel in general fiction, or a post-apocalyptic SF novel, but it seems like almost like a policy w/ these guys. They DO have decent new books on music and some other stuff, but their new book section is equally geared toward the highbrow. Sad for me, but the new location of Better Read Than Dead will be open soon enough and that's also close to me, hurray for nice booksellers.

Interesting, I have only had positive experiences at Unnameable— but I think that their focus on poetry is part of that

Maybe the Turner's Falls location is better. But the one here, blech.

(i guss i should clarify that i'm talking about the brooklyn location! there are so many great stores in this city, and that ain't one of em imo.)

No mentions of Night Flight Plus itt? The UI needs a LOT of work (it has, at one point or another, crashed on every device I've watched it on), but content-wise it's maybe my favorite streaming service. Warning: you might need to love garbage to get max enjoyment out of it. But there's so much good + obscure stuff, and a bunch of boutiques stream their stuff there (and it pays off for them, cuz I often wind up buying the physical releases after streaming surprise treasures).

I like Unnameable here mostly for the cool new stuff. its stuff i would never see otherwise because i never go anywhere. but its selected nicely. they have soooooooo much poetry in the turners store. shelf after shelf after shelf. its crazy. i know how hard it is to sell! you have to just really want to have it there. you will not sell a lot of it here. but they have been hyping poetry with lots of readings. so they are trying to make that part of their identity. they have some interesting non-fiction and old books. the only crime they have is a wall of old paperbacks and the crime is mostly vintage noir/pulp. the used fiction/lit is mostly all dudes and very 80s/gen x english major in general. plenty of good stuff but not the stuff i look for. i'm not looking for, uh, richard ford. i dunno. it just looks dude-ly. but the new fiction section is cool. lots of cool stuff to look at. but lots of fun stuff to pick up all around. and $$$ art and photography books that i can't buy but that i can look at.

A handful of streaming services is STILL better for library, resolution and on-demandness than what we had in the 90s. And cheaper without adjusting for inflation.

at my store in philly in the 90s i sold bootleg vhs tapes of japanese laserdiscs. $10 each. Todd Haynes Superstar bootlegs. my friend joseph had a catalog! he duped stuff at home. he was good at it.

https://i.imgur.com/CSYEKlU.jpeg

I bought around 50 books/CDs/DVDs at the yearly town sale this past week. I won't live long enough for physical media to disappear; the secondary market in all its various guises will be around longer--probably much longer--than I am.

I know it's bad of me and I hope physical media keeps on going for other people but I'm content to be digital. Moving boxes and boxes of books once a year sucked, I tossed all my CD jewel cases and put them in binders (before I gave them all away), my habit of buying DVDs or Blu-Rays and then just rewatching the X-Files or something was pretty shameful.

I do sometimes contemplate starting to collect old pulp paperbacks, all the old editions of Jim Thompson and Raymond Chandler I can find, weird Frank Frazetta fantasy covers.

The last vinyl I bought was Katie Alice Greer's solo album off Bandcamp, it arrived the week my turntable stopped working and I haven't bought another one. It would be cool to get a SL1200 for sampling and go crate digging... but there are no dollar vinyl options around me, Half Price Books thinks all twelve copies of Whipped Cream & Other Delights they've got on hand are worth $10 each and the dedicated record stores are crazier.

at my store in philly in the 90s i sold bootleg vhs tapes of japanese laserdiscs.

Jodorowsky, right? Every boot of El Topo et al. back then came from Japanese laserdiscs. You could tell because they blurred all the genitals.

How did this thread go all day without anyone asking scott how many books are in a gaylord

because we wpuld all ofc realise it depends on the books

it depends on the gaylord

lol

My Kanopy subscription through my university sucks so bad.

How so?

Kanopy is different depending on the library. Mine only purchases films that are being used for classes.

SOUNDS LIKE A RACKET. WHO IS THIS KANOPY AND WHAT IS BIG LIBRARY HIDING???

ah okay. its owned by Rakuten. better than Amazon? you be the judge.

It's basically a service for libraries. I don't know if you can compare it to other streamers.

I don't use a textbook in my film class -- I have videos and designed my own PowerPoint slides -- so I force students to subscribe to the Criterion Channel. I know full well they've torrented their whole lives, so I stress that however they wanna cheat the system is fine with me.

I used to have it through the Manhattan (plus Bronx and Staten Island technically) library and the Queens library but Manhattan canceled it because I think they charge the libraries a pretty penny, so now I only get it through the other one and the selection is okay but kind of limited.

My library licensed about 600 Criterion films through Kanopy, so I don't subscribe to the Channel.

"It's basically a service for libraries. I don't know if you can compare it to other streamers."

i was just curious who owned it.

I'm not sure which Kanopy level our library subscribes to, but it has a ton of good and interesting movies. I watch almost as much from there as from Criterion. Just watched "Tangerine" and "I Do Not Care if We Go Down in History as Barbarians" via Kanopy in the last month.

So I hit up the new B&N, and...it's nice(?). Smaller, but also less hoity-toity than B&N's of yore. Really feels like a vintage Borders, with shelves dancing in every direction. The newsstand is packed, seems like they're carrying every remaining print magazine. Lots of vinyl, maybe more new stock than some area record stores. CDs & DVD/BLU/4K another story. If you want something that's not Criterion or a major studio release, you're SOL. I don't think I even saw any Arrow stuff. CDs are next to them, spines out on a single tall rack. Pour one out for Bonamassa: no titles at his most reliable outlet. No bargain assortments either, a saving grace in the past (I got so much cool shit from their $5 bins in the before times).*

*After typing that, I checked again, and they have a cheapie section that's poorly demarcated and organized.

shelves dancing facing

Instead of Kanopy our library has Hoopla, which appears to be a combination of a low-rent documentary streaming service and one of the less Roku channels.

lesser

i think i get every dr. who on britbox. i attempted to start at the beginning at one point - maybe during the pandemic - and didn't get far. i left them with the cavemen and daleks. that show is always kinda frightening to me. like a bad dream.

― scott seward

everybody wants to start at the beginning with doctor who, for the love of god if you're watching doctor who _don't start at the beginning_. old doctor who isn't that kind of show.

what can i say, people like objects

― ivy.

jackie treehorn treats objects like people!

eventually, i'll get rid of it all. i don't do online/cloud. i've never uploaded or burned a movie or a cd in my life. i have zero music saved on my computer. i think i could live completely with streaming services and youtube and a choice selection of records and be fine. and when the power goes off for good i'm gonna learn how to play the sackbut or something.

― scott seward

just don't break your glasses. that's all i can say.

but no like the idea of _owning_ stuff, the older i get the less it means to me. i've tried to figure out how to put my writing in the cloud from my nas and i can't do it, all it does is creates copies of every single file in my subfolders in my root directory which is _not_ what i want... my greatest worry is losing all of that, all of the writing i've done. cuz my memory ain't so good. and photos, i guess. i somehow have 38 GB of personal photos. how do i have 38 GB of personal photos? idk.

all of my like "rare" shit? nah. i got more shit than i can find, i got more shit than i can remember, and i mean, it's fine because life is endless novelty now. it's not about _possession_, it's about _experience_. experience is ephemeral. life is ephemeral. i'm glad i have a NAS because i'm a hoarder, a digital hoarder. if it wasn't for that black box in the corner of my living room i'd wind up being crushed to death by a stack of falling newspapers i'd never read.

the main thing i think about now is what happens to all of the _stuff_ i've collected when i die. probably nothing. probably nobody cares. i mean nobody has the access password but me, and i can't even remember the access password. security!

I do salute B&N’s continuing commitment to magazines.

But then I remember that for years they had an outlet in Baltimore’s inner harbor that was three stories tall, with a mind-bending selection of magazines, comparatively. R.I.P. that place, which I never got to spend enough time in.

Also, their current CD section is awesome if what you want are Taylor Swift albums

<SAD BONAMASSA JPG>

There’s a B&N next to where I work that used to have a pretty huge magazine section. Now it’s about half the size of a 90s grocery store magazine rack.

I'm curious now to check out some of the surviving older locations in the area and see what they're like these days. But then I remember two of the three closest ones to me are in mall/shopping plazas that are a pain in the ass to park at, and the third is suburban one that's out of the way for anything else I'd wanna do except maybe eating at a Cracker Barrel or something.

Wow, checking out reviews on that third one on Google maps, and one of the first ones to pop up is somebody showing off a COVID truther book with a foreword by RFK Jr.

Have we every done a musical format poll?

That'd be interesting. Vinyl, CDs, cassettes, streaming, mp3s...would anything else be worth including? (Or did you mean just physical formats?)

shellac, reels, 8-track, minidisc, DAT, USB drive, after that I think we'd be good? idk maybe wax cylinders, I do actually know someone with a player

Apparently the Japanese government have finally eradicated the parts of legislation mandating the use of floppy disks for various record keeping purposes, eleven years after Sony made its last floppy.