Weeding my DVDs

Today was another of my quarterly trips I take to visit the various used-bookstores here in my hometown of Edmonton, and although I had a successful time of it, I have found I'm now apparently in the process of weeding my DVD collection.

We have a pretty large collection (although I do have certain friends who put my collection to shame - Hi Ron!), and as we have begun to collet Blu-Ray discs, we are now repeating the great migration from  old to new (last done in the early 2000s when we migrated our VHS tapes to DVD).

So now we have to decide which movies or TV shows deserve to be purchased a third (or in some beta-related cases a fourth) time, and surprisingly a lot of titles don't make the cut - especially if we can access these films through our local library or friends collections, so we ended up cutting out about a sixth of our collection this week.

On the plus side we now have a bit of breathing room on our DVD shelves, and we can begin to pull titles that we haven't yet seen to move to the growing pile of titles that I need to work my way through before I can try that fancy new Netflix service we've been hearing about in the last few years.

Things I think about while Installing Game Data

So I've been sitting for about five minutes this morning installing the game data for Batman: Arkham Origins for my Playstation 3 (which I just got from my local library by the way - I love epl)

As the game takes its time to load up I'm wondering exactly how far I'll be able to get over the weekend.

I've finished up much of my school work at a frantic pace specifically to be able to focus my weekend on this new game (and hopefully a movie) so now I'm simply waiting for the load to finish and get going on the new Batman Game.

I sure hope the game is worth the wait - not the wait on the hold queue at the library, but this amazingly long time spent loading the game onto my machine.

When I was younger and loading games on my old Mac or at friends houses watching games load up on the 386s, we could spend an afternoon watching a bar slowly move across a screen before we could start playing our Dungeons & Dragons or Civilization game.

This is actually taking me back, and not necessarily in a good way.

I'm now at 65% loaded…

…

…

67%

…anyway, I think I'll head off to drop my daughter off at her party and hope the game is up and running when I get back.

Batman!

Things I've Noticed: The Hold Queue can be a good thing

Although it was only a few weeks ago that I was complaining about how my public library sent me too many of my holds, I’m now sitting in a large number of hold queues; basically I will be lucky if any of the 23 items I am waiting for will be available before January.

So with a whole bunch of time on my hands (the next three books I’ve scheduled myself to read are all loaners from friends who I won’t be seeing for a few days) I’ve decided to dig into my comic books. Having read Starman last month, and reading Justice Society of America for this month, it’s time for me to check out a few titles I’ve been meaning to get around to reading.

Over this week I’ve read Joe Hill’s Locke & Key: Welcome to Lovecraft, Things Undone by Shane White, Tim Seeley’s Hack/Slash Omnibus #1 (I’ll have a book review of it up on Monday), a bunch of Hellboy titles and some Astro City as well. The best part is I can read a couple a day and get a nice dose of great genre fiction.

In the end, I’m always looking forward to my library holds, but spacing like this allows me to check into a lot of my own stuff, so it works out for everyone.

Things I've Noticed: My library keeps sending me batches

It’s not really a complaint, per se. I mean, I enjoy getting new movies from my local library like everyone else, the problem is, I’ll put a who bunch of holds on items listed as “On Order” and although my position in the hold queue varies from #1 of 15 copies to #284 of 29 copies, everything seems to show up on the same weekend.

Last weekend I got the following films: Pom Wonderful Presents The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, Rio, Unknown, Tabloid, and Source Code (which will get its own post soon).

This week I’ve got the following films: Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary, The Conspirator, Limitless, and The Lincoln Lawyer.The problem is that as all of these films (excluding Dracula – a title I got recommended to me from the very enjoyable Scotch & Comics podcast) have a very small window in which I can watch them and they keep showing up in these big batches. At my local library you can only keep DVDs for a week (which is pretty standard) and you can’t renew the DVDs you have out if someone else has a hold on the title (which is also pretty standard). This tends to leave me with about a week to fit in a half dozen new release films (90 minutes to 2 hours in length) with my own television watching, family time and schoolwork.

So I guess my problem with my local library comes down to the fact that they are too efficient and have many films I am quite interested in sitting in their current collection.

Ummmm…. I guess that isn’t really a problem so much as yet another reason I like my library a lot.

Never mind.