I have gone on record many times expressing how concerned I was about downloading all my movie and game content and giving up the implicit power and control that comes with owning a physical piece of something.  Sure, lots of physical media, like VHS tapes and vinyl records, warped and became useless over time.  But, on some level it feels good knowing the things you've paid for live in a sock bag under your bed, instead of in the mythical cloud in cyberspace.  I'm the guy who owned about 300 DVDs, and a huge jukebox to rule them all.  It made me feel warm and fuzzy.

I've changed my mind.  In a big way.

About 9 months ago my DVD jukebox died.  Then I moved twice in 6 months and found out that 300 discs weigh more than they should.  This weekend, I spent two days performing a spring cleaning in my new apartment (Spring arrives for about 4 days in June, here in Washington state).  I started warehousing all those game and movie cases for the various game systems, and slipped the discs into a sleeved binder.  They take up much less space on my shelf that way.  Space that - even in the real estate post-apocalypse - costs good money.

The process of transferring those discs took about 2 hours and I'm pretty sure led to a repetitive stress injury in my shoulder.  That's when I realized "this sucks".

I support the right of any man, woman, child or beast to disagree.  If you need physical stuff to feel more secure in your purchase, by all means keep supporting physical media.  I feel your pain.  For me, though, clutter is my enemy, and I dream of a virtual jukebox where all my games and movies live happily in the cloud and take up no space in my physical world.

I know that this disc-less future I am begging for has to come with a better DRM than the one many of us have dealt with.  I've heard a decent fix to our own DRM woes is around the corner...  Soon... soon (and, I know for many of you, not soon enough).

No option is "perfect", I'm sure, but given the pros and cons, I'm sick of owning piles of stuff.  I've stripped my discs of their cases, shredded most of my old bills and donated more than half of my books to the library.  Once I get the nerve up, I'll donate the rest and visit them when I'm feeling nostalgic.  I'd try to convince my library to stock a full set of game discs and movies, but I'll settle for games in the cloud soon.