no.

100% you got the retro Geocities and late 90s/early 2000s internet look down and I’m really appreciating the vibe. All that said I got a question (rant really if I’m being honest) about physical media vs digital and I’d appreciate your thoughtful insight on it. Tangent warning as I sometimes do, gonna be a long one.

To be clear I can’t lump books into this argument thanks to the existence and prevalence of libraries, so I’ll be focused on games as the media of choice for this argument, but feel free to use music and CDs/vinyl as you wish.

With the overwhelming shift away from physical media to digital only copies, it hasn’t come without its criticism, namely that you don’t truly own the material and you’re one failed internet connection or company closure away from losing everything you paid for.

I can’t entirely disparage that point because it is a valid one, but then many will take it a step further and say if you don’t own physical media you’re an idiot or something else equally disparaging as if physical media had no downsides or some kind of strange virtue signaling.

I’d like to offer a more nuanced take and get your reaction to it. Physical media does have its place, but just because you don’t need an internet connection doesn’t mean it’s the perfect or even an ethical solution. It’s easy to dismiss digital media as being entirely beholden to whomever you bought it from, but then in fairness physical media can be lost, damaged or destroyed and rendered useless.

I’d also point out the copious amounts of e-waste that physical media created as a nuisance that digital media has minimized as an environmental argument for the transition to digital media. Add to that the trend of living smaller and tighter, not having huge shelves of physical disc and game media opens up storage and room which is very attractive, especially in the RV & tiny home movements.

In complete fairness and in defense of physical media, I’m an old school PC gamer from the early 90s onwards. Built my first PC during the Clinton administration in middle school. I remember when game boxes were the size of a large-font hardcover book that came stuffed full of goodies like beautifully glossed and printed game manuals sometimes a couple hundred pages long, Knick knacks, keyboard shortcut layouts and other goodies. Buying a game at the computer or game store was an experience and digital media has killed that experience.

Today, that quality of physical media would be considered on some hyper rare super collectors edition costing hundreds of dollars, not standard. I believe that with that loss the love and pride for the product has been lost. I would submit that coinciding with the loss of quality physical media (I’m talking more than just a disc in a jewel case) is when gaming started the slow inexorable slide towards the slop we see today. GamePass and other digital subscriptions versus buying the game made the slide even worse.

TLDR digital vs physical media. Less physical waste and wasted space and easy to replace versus pride in ownership and no reliance on any kind of connection or question on who actually owns the content and the quality of product.

hey there! thanks for reading and taking a look around

i totally agree with you -- i don't see this as -an "or" problem or a "vs" problem, but an "and" problem. i am not anti digital media whatsoever. i'm uncomfortable with physical media supremacists as a software developer myself. part of the reason i got into coding was to try to help people with these kinds of problems.

i make software for schools for a living and much of what we do is in the name of helping instructors save on materials. i'm sure you have heard teachers have had to buy their own class materials. and similar to your thought, even though the software is intended to help with waste-- i am vehemently against children on screens and have no desire to cut back on the tactile materials they need to learn with.

it's not about one thing being better; it is about choice.

my reasoning for wanting better offline options for gamers has to do with some people not having internet, people hating updates and patches, and the dangerous world of privacy, data markets, and microtransactions that can prey on our kids

that's why i presented the idea of an assets folder and allowing people to decide if and when they want a physical copy. everything after that-- how many copies they want, how much material they use, is up to them. choice.

adding artistic value to products also helps preserve it. by letting creators make their own media on demand creates an art market for games. the art market for games can't just be nostalgia, that's a fixed number of items that gatekeeps people, while a living, breathing market creates opportunity instead

but yeah. i agree. i am not one to subscribe to binary arguments. everything has a right to exist and people are allowed to have different opinions. the binary is too easy to weaponize. the real crime is often the loss of choice and suits thinking we are dumb enough to think they're working in someone's best interest other than their pockets.

Finished the Media Digest section of my blog, which allows me to document movies, shows, and games for each season.

Gallery can be viewed as a thumbnail gallery or list and each title opens a description and rating.

On the backend, I am able to pull titles, links, and thumbnails from TheMovieDB, rawg.io, and apple music APIs so I don't have to manage thumbnail and title accuracy

i never get to see this tattoo and it still looks good after being extremely processed and filtered

games should not be built to only function with a WIFI connection or marketplace sign-in (steam included). games should not literally break if you don't get a patch or DLC. in fact- old versions of games pre-patch and pre-DLC are collectible and at times, more well loved than post-patch versions.

a limited amount of copies should be made physically and priced only slightly higher than the digital

the digital price should honestly come down i mean come on.

in your game files should be a folder of assets with labels, covers, and stickers that lets you burn a disc or create a usb-based cartridge for that game or a group of games as you please. this should be encouraged. different games can have different artworks to celebrate artists and increase digital collectibility, which is a lot less silly than the NFT approach.

this allows companies to scale down production, mitigate waste, and allow people to have the choice of how they want to play games. if you have multiple games per disc, per usb/sd (entire series,etc), it saves that many CDs, that many cartridges, that much plastic.

whole indie services could be born of this. etsy artists can make and sell their own hand-drawn artworks. etsy services can print you your disc or cartridge if you don't have the means. artists can 3D print cartridges, USBs, and SD card holders in interesting and specific shapes for each game for you and no two people will have the exact same packaging.

who knows? one day, great artists will be collectible in a resale market, which allows gaming to be more indie, more handmade, more creative. files can be converted into different cartridges for entire DIY consoles made by individuals.

we can print things on demand now. let's leverage that for less slop and more services. it's not about one medium being better than the other, but the fact that our choices are being taken away. physical media lovers tend to enjoy the work involved. fucking let them.

i have seen multiple random shorts and videos lately that have brought up the canon ae-1 as a monumental achievement in product design and it warms my heart because my dad was always firmly attached to his. every. single. family photo in my lifetime was taken on the ae-1.

i have forgotten time and time again to ask for it now that he asks me to take pictures for the family now. i've been unfamiliar with film and a bit too intimated to inherit the camera outright, but i might be ready now. it's an underrated object that is closer to my dad than most of his other possessions.