Wednesday Thoughts 11
This is the 11th "Thoughts" post I've written on a Wednesday. I don't know why I've written so many thoughts on Wednesdays in particular, but it's by far the most prolific day for me when it comes to random collections of topics.
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This morning I read a post from Flamed Fury about what music ownership means to him; I think we have similar opinions about music streaming, just the other day I lamented about the volume of songs on my yearly playlist of songs I liked (it's 6 hours long) and that I'll likely never listen to it again. I thought it highlights how disposable music streaming can be.
Our views do differ slightly in that I both enjoy owning music AND subscribe to Spotify. The latter is convenient for me and my general opinion about such things is that if it's useful for you, you shouldn't feel bad about using something1. My thoughts while reading his post went immediately to my iTunes library: I hoarded music in my 20s, and I have too many things there that I will likely never listen to again. I downloaded them because I could, and downloaded entire albums. I loathe the idea of pruning my library, and in fact I'm intimidated by the idea. I'm in the (slow) process of re-importing my CD library to replace MP3s with higher quality files, so I will be keeping those, but at some point I must go through my collection and delete things I have no business including in my library.
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Brandon recently wrote about his simple, low maintenance life and that prompted me to email him what turned out to be a little journal entry about the physical media I own. In short, I'm going to get rid of most (if not all) the TV shows sitting on my shelf. Maybe I'll rip them to my Jellyfin server first, but I collected these things in the 2000s and have carted them around move-to-move and I could not tell you when I last watched any of them. I know that there is no guarantee any of these will be available via streaming (the Star Trek series in particular are coming off Netflix Canada in January 2026, at which point if I want to stream them I'll need to subscribe to Paramount+), but let's be honest...if I haven't reached for them off the shelf, would I be streaming them anyway? I'd love to have a re-watch of Dead Like Me but I am comfortable ripping the DVDs and donating the box set.
Additionally I'm giving my N64 to my friend. He'll get much more use out of it. I'm happy to keep many of my old consoles but I never owned an N64, and ever since I bought a PS5 I haven't touched many of those games in the basement. I should really get rid of my GameCube - while it has the neat Game Boy adapter on the bottom, I still have the Super Game Boy on my SNES to play my Game Boy cartridges that won't fit in my DS Lite, and I can play my GB Advance games on that. The Wii I own (which I won in a contest!) can easily play GameCube games so that extra console is yet another literal cube sitting, collecting dust.
I feel like 2026 is going to be a year of purging.
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As I type this I hear colleagues talking about how warm it's going to be (it's Winter here, even 1°C is warm) over the next few days, lamenting how long the Winter season is going to be this year. "Just wait until February". I am unreasonably bothered by people complaining about Winter...we live in a cold climate. And in fact our Winters have been significantly less harsh in recent years (thank you, Global Warming). The only weather I think is worth complaining about is the hot Summer months when temperatures soar above 35°C with humidity. When it's cold you can pile on all sorts of clothing, but when it's hot...there's not much you can do within the confines of public decency.
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It's hard to fathom the year is almost over. We're halfway through Week 50, leaving only two weeks left in the year. It's also exciting. I look forward to making plans for things to tackle in 2026 - chief among them will be The Purge I mentioned earlier. I look forward to more writing, reading, and playing (whether that is video games or TV shows or movies). I hope to get some more posts out before the end of the year but I'm not going to force anything. Just in case, I hope the next two weeks are relaxing and stress-free.
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I think it's important to understand how things work and reasons why something might be considered "bad", such as how little artists make on Spotify, but don't delete a service just because someone else thinks you should. Make your own decisions.↩