Amass media

Today we bagged up six garbage bags full of VHS video tape. Seven seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, five seasons of Angel, faithfully taped, labelled, and stored in indexed shoe boxes. Janet had snagged the bulk of them from reruns on UPN -- we saw much of the series on tape to catch us up to the story somewhere along the fourth or fifth season.

Fans that we were, we eventually acquired the complete DVD sets . . . which occupy about a tenth of the space as the video tapes. Anybody we knew who would have any interest at all in the tapes would most likely already have access to the DVDs (through NetFlix if nothing else). The tapes were too big to ship to someone who wasn't local -- you could probably buy the DVDs for the cost of shipping the VHS. We couldn't even give them away on Craig's List, for fear of some zealous industry lawyer giving us a hard time.

So . . . into the trash bags. With every box, a part of me kept saying, "But . . . but . . . maybe we could reuse the tape," knowing full well that we've taped all of maybe two hours of programs in the last five years. In an age of DVRs like Tivo, how many people are still using tape anyway?

We are attached to things, not by what they give us, but by what we put into them.