I ventured back into the world of Netflix last month, after probably a 4 year hiatus. There were a few series I had been wanting to watch for years, but for whatever reason I had been too lazy to get around to. I have access to Netflix through the account of my friend who owns this house, since it was originally a sort of roommates account, but I was also extremely lazy about asking for the credentials. I think, honestly, that I just wasn’t ready to have easy access to Netflix. There’s always a place for rest and entertainment, in my mind, but TV is one of those things that makes me feel like crap when I watch too much of it. It’s like junk food.
Anyway, I had long wanted to watch Neon Genesis Evangelion, an anime that was supposedly groundbreaking for its time and tends to make its way onto every top list of the mecha genre. Apparently Japan is an interesting place, and it’s extremely easy for anime and its music to get stuck in legal hell, so the 90s originally dub is way different than the Netflix dub. Original VHS/DVD copies sell for hundreds online, most of them boot-leg at that, and one solution was going to be a $175 Blu-ray set being released in December. I wanted to watch “the original”, but then, after I really thought about it, I realized that paying $175 for something I’ve never watched, just because I think I want to see the original, which I otherwise have no nostalgic connection to, is pretty stupid, especially considering that the series is on Netflix, and it costs like $14 for one month of access.
So I decided to pay for one month of access.
Evangelion was awesome, except when it wasn’t. The story is bold, very bold, but also batshit crazy at the end. It left me feeling empty and lost. Like…that was it? Watching Asuka kick ass in End of Evangelion (the short follow-up movie that was supposed to help things but didn’t) was some of the best animation I’ve ever seen, but in typical anime fashion, everything she “kills” comes back to life. Is futility a strong trope in Japanese culture? I hate how so many otherwise promising animes shoot themselves in the foot with this crap. Xenosaga did this to some extent. And speaking of Xenosaga, holy crap, it’s clear that Evangelion was one of the central stories that influenced its creation. The 12 square monoliths of the Seele elite very clearly were the direct influence for the 12 Zohar emulators. Mind blown.
Anyway.
Media. So yeah, I also watched Avatar: The Last Airbender, which was super wholesome, and I caved and watched Squid Game, too, which was an interesting show, although I have no doubt it will go the way of Saw, and be one of those things that is endlessly milked for cash because the formula is so easy to continue, until people get tired of it and production values dwindle. This Netflix foray was fun, but the sheer quantity of entertainment available was overwhelming. Some people really get sucked into that, and spend their lives just going from one series to the next. I made sure to cancel before my card was charged again.
I don’t think it’s some conspiracy of the entertainment industry to warp our minds. I think we just live on a planet with 7-8 billion people, and quite a number of them are creatively gifted and want to produce entertainment, and because we live in a globalized world, we have access to quite a lot of that entertainment. But you can’t watch all of it. That would take man-years of time. Hell, man-decades of time. You’d have to be a loser to try to take on all of that.
And speaking of losers, how much of my entertainment am I ever going to watch again?
I do have the option to continue renting from my friend wherever he might move, and that’s the direction I’m leaning in. But while I’ve gotten rid of things over the years, I’ve also acquired things, and I would like to once again decrease the amount of media I own, because let’s be honest, most of these I haven’t watched in years, and the chance of watching them again is slim.
And think about it. A new movie usually costs $20-25 to buy. Renting it online, when it isn’t available on a streaming service, is usually $4. So you’d have to watch the movie 5 or 6 times to recoup your cost. This contains with it the catch-22 that you don’t know if you will rewatch something until you’ve seen it. Even a $10 movie has to be watched at least twice to roughly recoup the cost. The added benefit to streaming instead of buying, too, is that you don’t have physical media bogging down your living space.
As a single person who still intends to some day marry, I have to realize something, too: I am in the fortunate but weird position of having a lot of money, but also very few responsibilities. Once you have a wife and kids, things change, stuff accumulates, compromises are made. Still intending to take this next year off, I realized something: it is now or never if I want to go full-scale minimalist. I don’t completely know what that would look like for me, but there is nothing stopping me from scrapping half my possessions. There’s nothing stopping me from going without physical media entirely.
Now, that’s not completely my intention. But seriously, which movies have I watched this past year? I think Alien, Terminator, the Harry Potter movies, Zeta Gundam (which sucked, so I’m never going to watch that gain). Oh, I did watch back through the Connery 007 movies, but that was with the intention of getting rid of them later. Coraline and 10 Cloverfield Lane with my parents.
Personally, I like having a small collection of movies, emphasis on small. I gave a whack ton of movies/series to some friends 4-6 years ago, and I really haven’t missed any of those. By all means, it’s nice to have access to entertainment, but I don’t need to own so much, especially since so much can be watched just paying $14 for one month of access to a streaming service. Although, I would staunchly reject any contract forcing me to pay for a year. That’s when the money really starts to add up. (Might make sense if you had kids, though)
And it’s not like it’s terribly difficult to move boxes of DVDs and Blu-ray s, but the moving process always sucks, IMO, and it also makes you wonder how you acquired so much stuff in the first place. Well, one item at a time.
My tools actually save me money, my media just sits around collecting dust.
Although I will say, there was a simple pleasure to having a series to watch through instead of flipping through YouTube channels, hoping something interesting is on. Ah, whatever.
And on that topic, I actually watched a video on YouTube about why Blu-ray kind of sucks. Has anybody else found the menus to be incredibly clunky and difficult? That’s always been the case for me. It’s easy to think Blu-ray = better quality, but this isn’t necessarily true, especially if you have to deal with those strange menus and can’t figure out how to work them. Also, DVD players are super cheap, and even your laptop can play DVDs (typically), but Blu-ray actually requires special hardware. Distribution companies were smart, though, so many Blu-rays actually have a DVD copy in them, too, as an incentive to pay the extra money. But I don’t know, when I go over to my parents’ place, I have to drag my PS3 or PS4 with me because they don’t have a Blu-ray player, and really don’t have a reason to buy one. Most media have extremely low resale value anyway, so I kind of feel that going forward, I want to steer away from Blu-ray , unless definition is something that is supposed to dramatically enhance the experience of a particular movie.
Wish I’d put more thought into these things years ago. The difference in price is not terribly dramatic, but if I’d focused more on cheaper DVDs, I wouldn’t even need a Blu-ray player. Oh, well. Whatever. I don’t have a compelling reason to ditch my PS4 at this time, but having nothing but DVDs would make watching movies with my parents a lot easier, and the cost savings would mean something, especially since resale values are so low anyway. It means that giving things away would be costing me a lot less on the whole.