6/27/2020
Recently, I've been thinking about my 'collections'. Maybe once or twice a year, my feeling towards physical media ownership starts to oscillate back and forth between positive and negative moods. Perhaps negative is too strong a word. Indifferent may be better. I own lots of music, lots of books, and lots of games. This means that I've spent a lot of money on all these things, the sum of which I'd rather not know. The question I come to ask myself is: why do I feel the need to harbor so much media? Most of the books I own I've read once (or some not at all), most the games I have I play once, though I do actively use a good deal of my physical music collection throughout the year. For my own cognitive sake, I'll break down my pros and cons of my collections here:
Pros:
-Instant offline access to media whenever I wish
-Visual time capsule of different points in my life, remembrance of past passions, phases, movement through life
-Being able to hold and look at the art of various media
-Ability to let others actively experience media I love

Cons:
-Costs a lot of money
-Costs a lot of space
-These items are fragile

And then there are more format specific factors such as being able to play games on original hardware for a more 'authentic experience'. Regarding games, another quetsion I ask myself is: why not just emulate? Is the gameplay really so different that emulation can't cut it? And am I valuing external factors over the gameplay, which should be the most important part? I've setup a RetroPi console in the past, yet I still stick to physical copies of games the majority of the time. I think one factor in terms of game collecting is that it creates a slow flow of access. Unlimited access through emulation can lead to the paradox of choice, where I just can't decide what to play. Money is the limiting factor which in some ways allows for easier choices and more cherished games (though it's strange that they aren't cherished as much otherwise, and the money saved could be going towards more important things). Same goes for books and music, really. I can essentially download any album I want to, and if I want a CD or tape copy I can easily make them myself from the download, yet I stick to physicals when I can. At times in the past, I was more prone to 'collecting' as more of an action than a circumstance. To collect as a pure action means to accumulate to accumulate, to 'create a collection', which can sometimes without the aim to actually use or interact with the items being collected; essentially, things are being collected to have them. To collect out of circumstance means that a collection arises through the garnering of more cherished and specific items. One is not collecting to 'collect', rather the 'collection' grows symptomatically and without thought towards the act of collecting itself. Collecting as a hobby and action has always seemed kind of odd, like collecting to collect. The times where I become critical of this are the times when I usually start selling a lot of my stuff that I don't really use anymore. I've been able to pare down much of what I own to what I love (almost in a Kondo way), which feels much better. I can pick up any CD, game, or book I have and really talk about it in a loving way.
I don't know if I had a goal in mind when writing this, it's really just to process what I've been thinking about.

5/19/2020
So begins my journal here. I haven't kept up with anything journal-like for over a decade. The journal I used to keep when I was little had a small lock and black paper, requiring gel pens to write in it. Usually, I typically wrote at night by flashlight under my bedsheets. Most of the content was intended to be 'extra secret' due to the conditions I wrote in, though much of the content was likely rather silly and imaginative. I had a livejournal for a brief period around 2006, but never really kept up with it that well. Hopefully I can dedicate myself to actually using this every so often. I probably won't update this super regularly, but maybe once a week or perhaps more if I feel like writing about a certain thing. Still not super sure about the layout of this page. Might update it at some point, but I suppose this works for now.