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Tonight I was hoping to watch Dredd, and The Amazing Spider-Man, as I’ve got a free Friday night, and for some reason, none of my other choices appealed to me… Explaining more would be a tangent, so lets continue with the story.

I was at the supermarket, and both films were on offer (DVD versions). I thought about picking them up, but thought “no, I’ll only watch them once, so having the DVD is needless clutter.” I figured I’d look on Netflix, or as a fall-back, rent on iTunes.

Neither film is available on Netflix, which sucks a bit, but never mind, let’s check iTunes… Neither film is available to rent1, so I’d have to buy… But the cost of Dredd is twice what the DVD would’ve cost, and The Amazing Spider-Man is almost an amazing three times the price! That to me seems like a bit of a rip-off.

So if I want to watch those movies at a wallet-friendly price I need to either a) go back to the store and buy 2 discs I don’t want, or b) pirate them. Neither option is appealing, so I’m unlikely to be watching these films like I’d hoped to.

It’s 2013, and we’re heading to a world where physical media is on its way out. So why is digital still so bleedin’ frustrating?

  1. as an aside, finding films to rent through the iPad version of the iTunes Store really, really, sucks! ↩
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Over the weekend I started a fun little project. I’m tracking down and integrating as much of my old blog content as I can, across all of the sites I’ve written over the years.

When You Were Young cover artI’m not going to integrate every last bit of content I find, just the “highlights” (some things are best left forgotten…). Linkblog entries, and projects with no relevance will be left behind. So far I’ve added around about 26 entries covering from 2003-2009. No doubt I’ll go back over these years and add more, as the content resurfaces. Where possible I am preserving the original formatting and links, though in some cases I will have to link to an Internet Archive page.

The impetus for this little personal project came from realising I had neglected and discarded a lot of my history. As I’ve moved from site to site, platform to platform, I’ve usually wanted to “start fresh”, to see if it gives me that impetus I need to keep the blogging habit going. So far that approach has rarely worked, so why allow the old content to disappear? It’s a shame I thought of this so late. There’s large holes in 10 years of content charting my growth as a person lost to the void.

In the content I have found I have noted a marked difference to how I am now. I used to be quite open, generally had a more upbeat, less formal tone, and was more inclined to create something for the sake of releasing it to the world. Entries were generally short, and more frequent, but punctuated occasionally by something more in-depth. It’s interesting, and definitely something I’m going to reflect on.

As a side-note, with the content moving over, I’ve redirected traffic visiting the old domains to a landing page on this site. Although most of the sites had been inactive for a while, or the content otherwise not available, it would be wrong to just leave them to expire without giving someone the chance to find what they were looking for. Besides, Fickle Me might decide to reuse the domain in the future!

Of course, if you want to check out the “historical” content, head on over to the Archive page.