The attachment towards keeping your attachments
A while back, I made a bold claim about turning a bunch of 1080i transport streams into 720p. I never seem to learn that bold claims are a poor substitute for actually trying first.
Put simply, I have a storage problem. Well, 17 GB remaining is not really a problem, but that means I can't do a lossless pass for anything longer than about 3 minutes. It just so happens that FictionJunction YUUKA at PopJam clocked in at 2:36.
I could just run AviSynth straight into x264, but that idea was quickly shot down when I noticed that TempGaussMC plus MCTemporalDenoise rendered at (roughly) 2 minutes per frame. It would take, optimistically, a week of non-stop number crunching. I'm not prepared to run my poor laptop for that long, so that idea is shelved pending the recovery of at least 30 GB. All for a 5 minute clip.
My storage problem might be easily solved if I just ran around deleting stuff. Series that I'll probably never watch again dominate my external, along with music that's 7 years old and has not been listened to even once (mostly I've Sound). But I can't bring myself to Shift + Delete.
I'm not a digital pack rat, I just hate to part with files. Okay, maybe half a pack rat.
Uh-oh, life story time
If you're a relatively upstanding human being, you will take out the trash at least once in a while. There's nothing wrong with cleaing stuff up out of necessity. But deleting media out of necessity is a foreign concept to me. Back in the bad old days, when all I had was a 40 GB internal, things filled up ridiculously fast. But there was always something new to watch! What to do?
Simple: I quit watching and went back to not failing out of school.
I was at an impressionable stage at that point. There was Escaflowne and a A Girl in Gaea. There was the Read or Die OVA, Millennium Actress, Evangelion, and new acquaintances were feeding me their mp3 collections. It added up, but how could I part with all this stuff?
The only time I've deleted any series or album/track is through frustration. Something has to be so terrible that I'll delete it out of spite. But even today, now that the "everything is good phase" has long gone, none of the above would be thrown out.
And so I didn't. And then my hard drive failed. I blame the genius designer who decided to put the hard drive right next to the CPU, because that doesn't get hot at all.
I wound up seeking out only a couple of the series that I lost, so in a sense it was a "deletion." But short of having electronics die on me, you will be hard pressed to get me to willingly delete much of anything. The best solution, I've found, is not to start (again).
Personification
Anyway, I constantly pitch myself on the idea of getting rid of something like Moyashimon. Well, how about something more polarizing, like Code Geass. I could have watched it or could have not watched it; it's not something that I particularly care for. But did it take a cheese grater to my soul? No. Therefore, it stays.
This is, I suppose, turning anime series into acquaintances. "Hey there, you're not such a bad fellow. I'm happy to be have met you. Let's keep in touch." Well I don't, but the option is always there, in the hard drive.
Going back to the trash analogy. The most frequent thing anyone throws out is perishable food. Why? Because if you leave that stuff around long enough, it will begin to smell, grow stuff, or both.
Information is not perishable. Bits don't go bad. In a pure sense, one should only discard information if it's wrong. In my warped calculus, wrong equates to terrible. If a series is terrible, then I was somehow wrong about it. This is, nowadays, a very rare occurrence, because I follow in the wide wake of the thundering herd of guinea pigs who have put their sanity on the line for SCIENCE.
I'm incredibly grateful, even as the drive usage creeps higher.
Covet thy platter
Before media capable of preserving information with at least 8-bit precision came along, a lot of the information we regularly accessed was held in our brains. Brains have a deletion option: forgetfulness. It is not instantaneous, but it is the default option. The useless stuff we forget with time, but the useful stuff goes with it if we don't make an effort at remembering.
And sometimes, we can't forget even if we wish we could. But that's for another entry.
Left to its own devices, the hard drive does not forget, to a first order approximation. Eventually, the magnetic domains will become disoriented to the point that forward error correction can't help, but my drive will have failed long before that happens. My hard drive will die, but it won't forget. Kind of like an elephant, so they say.
By the way, self-destructing media is a bad idea. People working on DRM can do better than spend their time replicating an evolutionary compromise.
So I return to prevention. Streaming would, in essence, outsource my storage problem, freeing my drive for other useless purposes like deinterlacing HD broadcast video. Streaming keeps things in a volatile buffer, deletable at any moment. Files that find a more permanent home are tough to evict.
How is this any different than using the internet at large as a backup solution? Colour me paranoid. Seeds dry up, packs disappear from bots, bots disappear in their entirety, etc. A bit of corporate backed organization isn't always a bad thing.
… are you kidding me? Hello takedown notice, license revocation, and possible bankruptcy.
So moral of the story? Buy lots of storage for the day litigation destroys the internet. Be a storage bug. It's the new gold.
P.S.
If you read through this incoherence, I want to shake your hand.