The Vine: July 13, 2011
I am a big DVD collector. I probably own over 400 DVDs, and that is a conservative estimate. (Honestly, I am afraid to count at this point, lest I realize the depth of my obsession.)
I eventually got to a point where the shelves I kept my DVDs on became overloaded, and I decided to start keeping the discs themselves in those zippered sleeved dealios (two of the really big ones and a couple of smaller ones). The issue I have is with the now-empty DVD cases themselves.
I have six paper boxes chock full of them, and I am loath to get rid of them for some reason. Let it be known that I am also a Virgo and a semi-hoarder, so I have problems getting rid of things in general. It wasn’t such a big deal when I had a larger house to live in, but I’ve moved into a smaller place with less storage space, so the boxes have become an issue.
I don’t know exactly what I’m asking you for. Maybe permission to get rid of them? Maybe an alternative idea for storing them? The sensible side of my brain says, “They’re not serving you any purpose, and you’re not getting rid of your DVDs any time soon, just toss the stupid things,” while the OCD side says, “But what if you need them? And how can you get rid of them? Are you mad?” so I think I just want an outside party to validate that getting rid of them is the correct and reasonable course of action.
Thanks, and rock on!
Hoarder? Me? The hell you say!
Dear Maddie Paxton,
Getting rid of them is the correct and reasonable course of action. The only circumstance under which you’d need the cases is if you wanted to sell the DVDs, and even then, you can just buy a box of sleeves or jewel cases at Staples.
Now, plenty of correct and reasonable courses of action give us agita in spite of their rational rectitude, so if it’s giving you a couple of hives, start smaller. Throw away one box; weed out the ones with dings or missing inserts, and throw those away first; come up with a plan to pitch a set number of cases per day for one month.
Ready to go bigger? Look at the entire collection. Be honest about when you last referred to or looked at the cases in each box; if it’s longer than six months, tell yourself aloud, “I can look up and/or print the case information from the internet; it’s going to be fine,” and proceed to the nearest curb with the boxes.
Note: you absolutely will have cause to look directly at one of the boxes within a week of pitching them. I don’t know why that is, but some stupid bar bet will come up regarding box art for Terminator 3 and you will feel somewhat bereft. Persevere! Remember: internet. Free yourself; pitch the cases.
Although I read them obsessively, I’m a novice in the world of blogging. But I’m thinking my family needs something and I don’t know if it exists. Here’s the deal:
My immediate family (parents, me, two sisters) live in three different countries, four cities. There are nine grandchildren, mostly young but three in their teens, two of whom live independently from their parents. We all for the most part really like each other and want to stay in touch, but it can get hard.
My sisters and I all resolved this year to be better about staying in regular touch with our parents and I’m hoping we can do it in part through a family blog. I’ve Googled and explored a few, but none have the particular wrinkle I’m looking for. To wit:
Right now, one of my nephews writes a daily blog which we all read. His mom emails a weekly letter to to the entire family (and it’s long — 10-15 pages usually. LOTS of detail!). We were thinking that it would be really nice to have one family blog where she could post her letter and he could write his daily updates, and that it would inspire all of us to post more regular updates about our own lives.
BUT — he has friends who read his blog, and my sister’s distribution list contains people outside the family as well. I don’t want to post updates about my kids and my life that my 19-year-old nephew’s random friends can read.
Is there a way to have a shared blog with different permissions for different sections? So family members could access all sections, but my nephew’s friends could only access his section, and my sister’s friends only hers, etc.? Is this a ridiculously simple request that I’ve just been unable to discover on my own?
Family Affair
Dear Fam,
Most out-of-the-box blogging software offers the option of password-protecting specific entries, or the entire blog. If you set up a Tumblr, for instance, the main Tumblr is always public, but you can also set up a side or sub-blog with a password. That set-up also allows multiple authors, which is perfect for your situation.
WordPress has a password-protect option for particular entries on both the paid and free versions of the software, and options for multiple admins/authors; no doubt Blogger does too. So, your nephew can just publish to all with no qualms, and you can post pics and notes about your kids — behind a password.
The other option is to create a Facebook group for the family that nobody else can join, and cross-post relevant content there, but Facebook’s “security” is not everyone’s favorite.
Tags: Hoarders popcult rando the fam
@Family – I know LiveJournal has a friends-only option, so if you & your family all join, you can limit access/viewing to just you guys. Or if you share an account/password (which you probably have to do to all post to it) and make it a non-public blog (no friends), no-one else will see it – I have a LJ account that I only use as a dump for pics & media files, so I don’t share it with anyone.
Regarding the DVD cases – I had a very similar problem with CDs. I found, when I thought about it, that what I wanted to keep wasn’t the cases, the bits of plastic, it was the “sleeves”. So … I took them out of the jewel cases and filed them, and threw away the bulky plastic. It saves a lot of space!
I know it’s just started, and you still need an invite, but the google+ thing might be a good alternative to facebook – you can create “circles” of just friends, or family, or acquaintances and limit who can see what postings. If you can snag an invite, then you can invite the rest of your family to join.
Also, I know plenty of people who keep more than one blog – either to split the personal and professional sides, or just because they cover different topics and such. You could have two, and just cross-post things that are for both family and the “public”.
TO further add to cayenne’s post:
With LJ, you can post to certain groups of people. So all of nephew’s friends and all of sister’s friends and all of your family have friended the LJ blog (this would require everyone to have an LJ account). Nephew sets up a sub-group of nephew’s friends+family, and posts to this group; sister sets up a sub-group of sister’s friends+family and posts to this group; you could have a sub-group of only family.
About the DVD cases, and I know this is just going to frustrate you, but please do some research on your plastic sleeve thingies.
A few years ago when I went to sell some CDs that I no longer listened to, the used CD place showed me some very tiny pinholes in the surface of the CDs. The guy told me that it was from the plastic sleeves, and that the only right way to store them was in their cases.
Now, the part I can’t remember is if this has something to do with the heat of the car affecting the plastic sleeves, or it it was the plastic sleeves alone. And this was a few years ago, so the materials may have improved, and that was CDs not DVDs, so YMMV. And this was not at all helpful with the actual question, was it?
@Fam: This is more of a pain to set up, but makes more sense in the long run: if you do use LiveJournal, it’s best for everyone to get an account, then set up a family community. You can close membership and lock every entry to members only. That way, only the family can join, post, and read, so you can all keep each other updated. Any family-related posts go into the community.
Everyone would still have individual journals where they can post whatever they want; if your nephew already posts publicly somewhere else so his friends can read it, it won’t be a huge deal for him to switch to LiveJournal (or if he already uses LJ, to continue doing so). And it might be better for your sister since she can break up what she wants to talk about so that it’s not 10-15 pages a week, but 2-3 pages a day, or so. And she can have her own group of friends.
A community idea to me is better than having one regular user journal to share, not only because the control over who’s reading it and accessing the information is better (what if your nephew doesn’t want someone else in the family to read something? If you all have access to one user journal, you can ALL see it just by logging in to post in that journal), but also because you can identify who’s posted what just by the username and userpic. If it’s nine of you posting under one username, it’s confusing; if it’s nine of you posting under nine usernames in one community, that’s much clearer.
My comment may not be clear, though!
@Maddie Paxton (hee): I collect jazz albums from the ’50s and ’60s (on CD, because I don’t have the room or the means to enjoy them on vinyl). I do what Jenny does and keep the liner notes and pitch the jewel cases, but only most of the time. If the CDs are of more significant value, such as a Legacy Edition or this bad boy, I keep everything. So for your DVDs, if you have limited/collector’s editions, hold onto the cases, provided you have room to store them. This may also be a good way to kind of bargain with your hoarder tendencies (and believe me, I sympathize) and pare down again later as you’re able to say you don’t need X, Y, or Z either because you were able to get rid of A, B, and C.
For the cases, would a posting to Craigslist be in order? If there was somebody in the world willing to give you cash for the pile of plastic, would it lessen the pain of parting?
As a non-hoarder (I moved 10 times in four years. Very good training for detaching from material goods. When it comes down to pitch it or move it, the brain does tend to focus. I keep nothing anymore.), it’s hard for me to know what to suggest, as ‘get these boxes out from under my feet!’ is motivation and reward enough. So maybe money isn’t the answer. Worth a shot.
@Liz – you may not have answered the question, but you’re right – if Hoarder really cares about the long-term value and preservation of the DVDs, she should probably research long-term storage options. There are archival-quality storage materials (Hollinger Metal Edge is one vendor that I know of) that will not damage the DVDs over time, whereas some plastics will.
Re: DVD cases – it might sound crazy but before pitching the cases in the recycling or trash – try putting them on Freecycle (or similar). It’s amazing what people will take if you give it away for free. I got rid of like 50 VHS tapes full of taped-off-the-tv episodes of BtVS, Dawson’s Creek, Friends, etc like 6 years ago (what?! I’m slow!) – the guy that got them was SUPER excited. Anyway, maybe it will make you feel better knowing that they are going to some use rather than just being tossed out.
@DVD Hoarder – no advice, just empathy. I’m closing in on you (if I haven’t surpassed you…) on the numbers, and I won’t remove my discs from the cases, because I’ve heard/read that the sleeves can damage the discs over time. But yeah, I have no idea where to put them all. And I wont even mention the thousands of books floating around.
@Family Blogger – WordPress has a few functionalities you can expand to to do what you’re looking for. BuddyPress will give you more of a social networking site with private groups/discussions/blogs etc. A multisite install of WP can give you one control panel/dashboard, but with every member getting their own unique site, so each blogger will have their own site, their own readers and their own way of controlling access. You can also combine this with a membership plugin to really keep people off the sites you want to keep them out of.
@Hoarder: Before binning the cases, check to see if your local recycling company will take them. That’s a lot of plastic to trash. My sister had a similar situation with CD cases a number of years ago, when this wasn’t a option, and that had been a major factor in holding onto them for so long.
As far as livejournal goes, why not just have everyone join, and then create a community called thewhateverfamily or something? You can post privately or publicly as needed to the community, and everyone can direct people to their individual journals for public updates of a nonfamily nature?
I second Freecycle. An auxillary to the rule “If It Exists, There Is Porn Of It” is “If It’s Taking-Up-Precious-Space Junk To You, It’s OMG-I-Never-Thought-I’d-Find-One-Of-These Treasure To Somebody Out There.”
An artist making an installation? A DVD collector trying to assemble vintage holders? Secondhand DVD seller looking for cases to hold his surplus DVDs? There are possibilities.
@Fam: I’ve not used Blogger, but I notice that their blogs will let you have a link list where when a blog on the list is updated, it’ll move to the top of the list with a note on when it was last updated. See here, for example (on the right side, partly down the page — under “Other Blogs I Like”).
The reason I bring this up is that, if I were your nephew and I had a blog, I’d be pretty pissed if the family started suddenly putting pressure on me to switch my blog to another platform (e.g., the “everyone switch to livejournal” suggestion). But if Blogger will meet your password-protection needs, your family can have its own private blog but let the link list function as an RSS reader for you, telling you when your nephew has posted something new.
That way the family only has to look on one page to see if anyone’s posted anything new (either on the blog, or on your nephew’s own blog, which they’d then have to click over to), but no one is telling anyone else to change the blogging they already do.
DVD Hoarder, before you pitch the DVD cases call your local public library and see if they can use them! We’re always looking for CD and DVD cases because, as you might imagine, our cases get a lot of wear and tear and need to be replaced on a regular basis. If you don’t want to stop and take out the sleeve info chances are a volunteer will be able to do so after the donation.
On the DVD cases-how about you sort through the DVDs, and give away the DVD and the case. Let’s consider the math-even if you just have 400 DVDs of two hour movies = 800 hours. If you could sit 24/7 and watch DVDs non-stop, without work or sleep or other entertainment, that would still be over six months of viewing. You aren’t going to watch all those movies. I’ll bet you’ve never watched some of them. So start trimming-not only the movies you don’t like, but the ones you may like, but probably wouldn’t watch again. I bet you can easily dump half your collection this way-and probably store the remainder in their actual cases.
For the DVDs – a possibly better storage solution would be a cd/dvd filing cabinet. Something like what Vaultz makes:
http://www.vaultz.net/cd_cabinets_and_accessories/VZ01094
They are small and the two drawer holds over 300 on its own (if you use their paper sleeves). You could get the four drawer and maybe file the paper inserts from the cases (like someone else suggested) in the spare drawer. We have these cabinets at work and everyone loves them. Good luck with it.
even if you just have 400 DVDs of two hour movies = 800 hours. If you could sit 24/7 and watch DVDs non-stop, without work or sleep or other entertainment, that would still be over six months of viewing. You aren’t going to watch all those movies
Ferretrick,
I am very close to being a book hoarder, and you’ve framed the problems of “Mattie Paxton” in such a way that I finally, finally see why I need to divest myself of much of my library.
Thank you.
Being a Virgo myself, I totally understand the hoarder side of the sign. But, once you take that first step in getting rid of the cases, it really makes everything easier. Let me tell you, it’s really nice when all the jewel cases are goine and you have a couple of organized binders by genre and title sitting on a bookshelf. I added another small dvd binder next to the dvd player so when I’m done with the movie, if I don’t want to file it away right away, I can still keep ’em protected. Take the step! Do eeeeet!
Seconding Nanc in Ashland. I dumped all my CD’s into 2 tidy holders, and donated all the empty cases to the local library. They were happy, and I wasn’t pitching more plastic into the wild :)
I NEED THAT COPY OF THE INNOCENTS ABROAD, SARAH! So what if I’ve tried to read it at least twice and failed?? I might try again! I might!
I have done multiple book/movie/DVD purges because of limited shelf/storage space, and the things I find hardest to get rid of are a)books I bought in a fit of intellectual panic and b)books or movies given to me as gifts.
With gifts, it’s usually a well meaning “you like to read/studied acting, so here’s a Book/Movie!” The contents of said book/movie are totally irrelevant: have anything whatsoever to do with my life or interests? Nope! It’s a book, you like to read, end of logic line.
But they were gifts, from people who did wish me well, right? So I’d hang onto the damn dustcatcher for YEARS, through moves, even, because I couldn’t bear to offend the giver, even if I never saw them anymore or they were a relative who lived across the country.
With books I bought myself, it’s usually a case of Bookstore Trance: where you start out innocently enough looking at the New Paperbacks table, and then you spot that one book you read a review of and have wanted to check out, and oh hey, look, one of my favorite authors has a new hardback out, and wow, this is that one I saw on Jon Stewart, and suddenly I’ve got like five volumes piled on my aching arm.
It’s even worse in used bookstores, because the price is so low I go nuts picking up great swaths of Dickens and Elliott and whatever else I’m panicking over because I’M ALMOST FORTY AND HAVEN’T READ MOBY DICK AUUGHHH…Then the books sit around my house, mocking me, and any actual enjoyment I may have gotten from them is drowned in a lake of self-contempt.
Accepting the truth and selling the “nice but it’s not me” pile does lead to a breath of serenity and a less cluttered dwelling–until I wander too close to Elliott Bay again…
Following up on ferretrick, your local library or hospital/hospice will happily take your castoff discs.
I use a 2-year rule: if I haven’t used an item in 2 years (excluding stuff meant for special occasions that don’t naturally happen often and heirloom-type stuff), it goes. I don’t remember the last time I missed anything tossed according to that rule.
Ferretrick,
800 hours is actually about a month of 24-hour viewing. Still a ridiculously long time, though!
Mattie, why don’t you rip the discs and store them on two external hard drives (one for backup)?
I think Blogger has permissions you can set to specify the post for specific people. As other people have suggested, the best option is probably to set up the family blog at Blogger or WordPress or something and put your nephew’s blog as a separate link on the side or as part of an RSS feed. So those who visit the blog can just click the link, but you don’t have to let his friends read it or ask him to change platforms. Alternatively, you could ask him if he’d be willing to crosspost it by copying and pasting each post into the family blog as well.
Even if nephew has his blog on a different platform, you can still use LiveJournal and have your nephew’s blog show up on your friends page as an RSS feed (that’s how I keep up with Tomato Nation, in fact! Although it’s just the first few lines and I have to click over for the full entry, it notifies me when something new comes up. And I think there’s ways to make your nephews blog posts come up in their entirety although I am not 100% sure.) That might be a good compromise between making your nephew switch platforms, and using a blog platform that properly supports controlling who can view what (for all its increasingly common faults, that is the #1 reason I stick with LiveJournal).
In fairness to MadPax, she’s not asking about getting rid of her movie collection, and 400 DVDs doesn’t strike me as ridiculous or hoarding at all. I know people who own far, far more than that, and if you count television that I own on DVD, I own far more than that many hours myself, I’m sure. (Just owning all of Friends is, what, 100 hours?)
I’m not sure of the relevance of how long it would take to watch them all as a session of uninterrupted viewing; that’s not the way anyone uses a movie collection. You own DVDs so that you can pick the one you want when you’re in the mood for it, or to lend it, or to show it to someone. If, in theory, you did that once a week (not at all absurd) with a different movie every time, you’d see everything in your collection within the next seven or eight years. In the life of a collector, that’s not a long time at all. Obviously, it depends on how much space you want to devote to such things, but storing DVDs out of their cases doesn’t take up much space at all, and keeping 400 DVDs is not any sort of a storage burden.
That’s why she’s asking what she’s asking, instead of what she’s not asking. Frankly, the “throw out some of your movies” suggestion is both underinclusive and overinclusive, I think. If she doesn’t throw out the cases, half her movies would take up FAR more space — probably ten times as much space — as all her movies without the cases. So unless she’s going to throw out the vast majority of her collection, she has to throw out the cases anyway in order to save substantial space, so she’s back to square one. If she just throws out half the collection, then she still has to figure out how to let go of belongings AND she loses a bunch of her movies AND she hasn’t saved nearly as much space as she was planning to. She hasn’t solved her original problem, and she’s made new ones.
She identifies her attachment to the cases as a bit irrational and compulsive; I’d support her in dealing with that, rather than avoiding it by having her throw out stuff she wants in order to keep stuff she doesn’t really want.
The answer, in my opinion, is just what Sarah says. Make peace with having to look up some stuff on the internet. I did it; I never looked back. Get rid of the cases. Let it go. You can do it!
@Maddie: I was in your shoes until a few months ago, when I finally pitched all of my DVD cases. It took me three years of looking at those boxes, moving those boxes from place to place, and having them haunt me in the periphery of my consciousness until I finally jettisoned them in frustration. It’s very freeing!
I have at least 1,200 DVDs in my collection, maybe more. I lost count a long time ago, but our wall of DVD shelves is a major element of our living room decor. I wouldn’t take them out of their cases, but if you must, the paper covers slide out easily and could be filed somewhere. I’ve swapped the covers out into new cases when the little tabs that hold the discs in place broke plenty of times. It’s great unless it’s one of the sets where they got cutesy with the packaging, like the MAD MEN Season 1 set in the Zippo-shaped box.
@Family Blogger – I’m going to second the suggestion of @Laurie and say look into a Word Press site with the BuddyPress plug in.
I’ve used both for a few years and they should do what you are looking for “a shared blog with different permissions for different sections” plus extras like allowing various people to have varying access to the innards of the site, the ability for everyone to have their own (public or private) blog, plus private messaging, forums, etc. Good luck!
Hey gang, Maddie here :)
Linda, you hit the nail on the head. I love my movies. I watch movies on a weekly basis, more since I have been unemployed. In fact, I have already done a purge of the movies I didn’t watch (which wound up being about a dozen total).
And thanks to the rest of the Vine readers, I have ideas about what to do with them besides just pitch them. I don’t know that I would’ve thought of Freecycle or Craigslist, but you guys are right. My “oh my god what the hell am I going to do with this crap” is someone else’s “hey check out all this cool stuff I can do something with”.
Thanks a lot guys!
With the second baby on the way in our smaller inner city house, I must admit I am in mayor purge mode. Books with sentimental value, those that would be difficult to get another copy of, get to stay, the rest have gone. Oh and buying new books are a last resort: the library and Kindle are first point of calls.
DVDs are down to the bare essentials, with the rationale that on demand will take care of most of the rest eventually. Plus I’ve been trying to calculate how many times I will watch a movie I buy vs the cost of renting it.
Anyways, this is not so much for @Hoarder, but others who have said they are in “I want to read/watch this, but I haven’t yet” mode. The realisation that I can say “Oh I have been meaning to watch this movie” about something which came out in the 1990s, combined with the increased amount of reading I’ve done from borrowing books from the library, made me think I need a deadline. So I am thinking of starting a six-month box. Put all the “meaning to” things in a box with a definite six month date on it, and anything that is still in there at end goes.
I’ll second using Google+ if you can get an invite.
Count me as another Virgo semi-hoarder (tomato sauce jars FTW!). Try offering the empty cases on your local Freecycle before throwing them away– you never know who’s going to want them (suggest them as good for a craft project, maybe?), and I’ve found that I feel less guilty about pitching things if I’ve made an effort to give them away first.
Wait wait! Throw out the DVD cases but keep AT LEAST the paper inserts. Why, you ask? Because I once had to replace a 400 DVD collection after a break in and ALSO kept them in binders. Keeping the paper inserts (when possible) was one of the few ways we had to prove the claim list for our insurance. Worked for the CD’s, too. But yes, toss those plastic clam cases. Or offer them on Ebay or something.
Family Affair, my extended family has used “MyFamily.com” for over a decade and it’s been irreplaceable. (In fact, if we hadn’t had it for 9/11, there would have been MANY more hours of freaking out among us.) It has literally changed my life in that we can live thousands of miles apart and still feel like we’re connected. The site is password-protected and easy to use.
Your nephew can paste his posts (or even just include a link to his blog posts) in “News” and his mom can put her long letters as Word documents in the “File Cabinet.” It’s not a direct connection to his blog or her letters, but barring that, it might be your best bet. I highly recommend the site!
Oh, look at that — there’s a blogging option on MyFamily.com 2.0. (We still use the odl version.) So there you go.
Give any empty DVD cases to your local public library (asuming they loan DVDs). Those things break under public use like nobody’s business, especially the center circle. any one we can get donated is one we don’t have to buy, and then we can buy … DVDs instead!
Backing up those who suggest donating the empty cases to your local library. Budgets are TIGHT. A busted center circle in a case means a rattling around disc, which very quickly means an irreparably scratched disc we can’t afford to replace. Library? Pretty please?