I’ve been meaning to clean up my hard drives again, because the accumulation of stuff has slowly but surely been going out of hand. It hit me that my portable disks are crammed with more or less the same things I’ve been saving since the days of DVDs, if not CDs. Coincidentally, being from the VHS generation, the newer modern means of storing data definitely comes in handy, if you don’t have a villa or at least a spare room to physically store either the memories or the crap you’ve been hoarding for all those years. Sometimes I wonder what will I in fact be needing in the near and distant future. To be honest, the family pictures and personal stuff of that kind means much more than series, stories, games, lectures and the like that at least I store on our portable devices. All of this stuff is essentially a tie-in between the past and the future, or rather my past and future. This bears the question of where the present moment comes in and what it actually means to experience things in the here and now, as opposed to being the subject of seemingly endless supply of member berries that are for the most part self-inflicted. BTW, thank you, South Park, for keepin’ it real! Anyway, as I was getting rid of my vast VHS collection a couple of years ago, when I was cleaning my cluster of childhood cram, I was recollecting on the old-school way of watching film and taking care of tapes and such. I took one cassette out of its slightly dusty cover and I could still clearly see the heavily (over)used magnetic tape. A walk down memory lane. It was kind of bitter-sweet in knowing I have mostly nice memories associated with those tapes and yet also knowing I have to get rid of them … the tapes, not the memories, because I won’t ever watch a cassette again and can’t pass them on either. The technology changes are so rapid, that saving old VHSs is akin to saving your dusty-ass commodore … if you had one. The time has simply passed them. The memories remain as they should, but unless you’re planning on opening your very own museum of old techs, you’re better of letting go of the old hulks of electronics. Funnily enough, the same goes for the CDs and DVDs. Although they take up much less of a shell space, you have to ask yourself if you’re really ever gonna watch an old TV show or play an old game on a slightly scratched disk that you’re not even sure if it will work anymore or play as it did in the old “glory” days … or have the same meaning as it did before. Now, the CD-VHS dichotomy is interesting from the perspective of rights and originality. It’s safe to say that most of us had home-made tapes, while CDs (especially music and games) were originals … until file-sharing became a thing that hit big with the torrent generation, of course. This is not really about piracy (whether or not you view it in inverted commas), it’s more about the means of getting your information and the stuff you like(d). When Internet was not the all-seeing eye yet, the effort of making a compilation of your TV-shows or music was a laborious process … either waiting patiently for the commercials to end, unpausing your VHS-recorder (because tape space was a big deal back then), or waiting even more patiently for your music to download (we’re talking about days, not seconds here). If I fast-forward to today, there is obviously a chance your car has a CD/DVD-player, so you can enjoy your home-made blast-from-the-past-collections like the top-shit DJ that you are, but that’s not always the case. Hell, modern computers don’t even have DVD-players any more, let alone a floppy disk that was the first one that got limp and forgotten. It’s all about smaller and stronger devices now … and rightly so. Taking into consideration the rapid changes in information gathering and saving, getting rig of bags-full of VHSs really wasn’t that big of a deal. Just as much as it isn’t a big deal if a file or two get corrupted on your PC over time, because the chances of you really needing them is becoming more and more slim as your accumulation of stuff continues. This is just our spoiled ego wanting something and trying desperately to hold onto it like Gollum holding onto his precious ring … that wasn’t actually his and which inevitably led to his own demise. I remember when I was researching for my dissertation and especially as far as mythology goes some books were harder to come by. Vandiver’s Heroes in Herodotus comes to mind. I was obsessing about it for over a year, because I couldn’t order either a physical or a digital copy. I got hooked on Vandiver through her audio and video lectures, because she in my mind embodied the essence of a great academic (or rather, she still does), namely: understanding the basics and complexity of your subject matter, knowing how to express it fluently and interestingly, and unveiling not just interesting information, but in a lot of cases deconstructing some misconceptions about said subject matter (of mythology). In the end, I managed to dig up the book from some library in France and had it shipped to the National library here in Slovenia. It took forever, it wasn’t cheap, it was in bad shape, but I finally got it. And then? Well, the book definitely was worth the effort, but to be honest, it didn’t really add anything groundbreaking in my own understanding of myth. I think it was just about that pesky academic dogma of references for the sake of references. This ties in to what my former mentor said about my hesitancy to research comics for my diploma, because it was essentially a new endeavor altogether. She said that it’s hard (if not impossible) to keep in touch with any given subject. However, if you have keen interest in it, you can manage much more than you can imagine, especially though hard work. It may sound like a cheesy pep talk, but I knew exactly what she meant and she was very honest (especially now looking back). If you love what you do and see merit in it (financial gains aside), you can make up for a lot of what you didn’t know beforehand. I mean, I read comics as a kid like most of us did, but it was still potentially too much for me to go into this new subject given the allotted time I had to finish the paper. Luckily, I endured and discovered (if not rediscovered) my passion for comics and consequentially visual culture in general. So, thank you again, Veronika! This ties into films as much as it did mythology later on, because myths (stories in general) were (again) a subject matter I enjoyed when I was younger, but had let go over the years. It seems that things come around and one’s inherent interests will always have a lovely grip on you are your reality. I can relate all of this to the whole cleaning is cleansing topic discussed here, because a lot of stuff on my disks in study-related: lectures and books and the like. Alas, no porn (any more) … As much as I would like to think that I will watch, listen or read most of the things I saved on my digital mainframe over the years, that applies only to a small number of works and with more and more of them constantly being produced, the rest of your saved stuff is there just for the sake of being there, you know: just in case. In case of what? The mythical deluge? World war? Profound epiphany? If you don’t need it, if you don’t intend to pass it on and are not sure if you ever will, you might as well get rid of it. Cleaning becomes cleansing becomes purification. Self-baptism galore! Think of it this way: ask yourself what is your most prized possession. And don’t say you don’t have anything like that, because we all do. It can be a photo, a book, a film, an album, etc. Think about it, what makes it special and why you need it. The truth is, in most cases we really don’t need it. You’ll retain the memory of said object whether you engage in it on a daily basis or not. And here’s the kicker: if your memory of it isn’t all that great, that just means you didn’t really need it as much as you thought. In Buddhist terms this is just unwanted fixation that holds you back from seeing the light and focusing on bettering yourself. Well, in Buddhist terms that can relate to the memories themselves, but that’s another thing in itself. The point is that we can live without our fabled prized possessions just fine (and we do actually), we just don’t want to admit it. These are our baby blankets we don’t want to let go in the “big bad world” we live in as adults. I don’t have a favorite book for example, because my interests are manifold and I try to view each work in its own light and in its own right. Smith’s colored and collected Bone series comes close, because it was a birthday present, I know it cost a fortune, it’s a comics masterpiece and it’s 1500 pages of storytelling delights that can because of its thickness and shear mass be used as a weapon to boot … but I haven’t opened it in a while and as much as I love proudly parading it on my shelf, the world (or rather my world) wouldn’t end if I didn’t have it anymore. Humans are hoarders by nature, plain and simple. The whole agricultural system that went hand in hand with the birth of cities and civilizations became one immensely large silo of grain that the heavily-consuming species that we are need … yet, we live in a world that’s on the one hand plagued by obesity and extreme poverty on the other. How can we even come to terms with that? I suggest that first we take the effort to come to terms with who and what we are individually and socially, so the unhealthy ego of mindless gluttony and hoarding gets replaced by the apt ego of positive change that is the drive for progress in general. With that in mind, “confirm folder delete”? Yes, indeed! Archives November 2017
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November 2017
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