Tonight I began the long, onerous task of removing my roughly 250 movies from their cases and jamming them into a giant CD wallet. This is the second phase of the great media pack-up. Back in February I finally ditched all my CD cases, though they and the original CDs had been boxed up and sitting in a closet for four years. Now it’s the DVDs.

The plastic DVD cases will be…I dunno, thrown out, I guess. While I’m entirely used to seeing them out and occupying yards of shelf space, Nellie thought they were ugly. I suppose she’s right. They’re just hunks of plastic. I don’t know though, I’m worried that without the ability to scan a shelf and see something that jumps out at me, I’ll just stop watching these. For the most part I own only movies that I’d want to see over and over again; how will my viewing habits change now that they’re out of sight? I grew up in a place where books, movies and music occupied every inch of the (rather formidable) shelf space in our living room, not to mention the books covering pretty much every other flat horizontal piece of wood in the house, so it feels weird for me to put them away.

I suppose at some point when I get around to procuring a media server I’ll buy myself a giant hard drive and start ripping these films and TV series, and watch them that way. I’m not quite there yet; not that I don’t like the technology, just that I haven’t felt a strong need to do so. Nor have I just seen it as a logical extension I’d already taken, as I did by streaming the music files I’d already made the ‘master copy’ of my music.

The books, I suppose, will be the last to go. Again, I have nothing against eBooks, I just haven’t had any incentive to switch so far. Besides, I think Nellie’s soft spot for having books on the shelves is almost as big as mine.

On an unrelated note: anybody need a couple hundred empty DVD cases?