Pixel Scroll 10/12/19 “Have Fifth, Will Godstalk,” Reads The File Of A Man, A Scroll Without Pixels In A Fannish Land

(1) NYRSF READINGS. The New York Review of Science Fiction Readings presents “An Evening of ‘Reckoning’” — creative writing on environmental justice – on October 14 with guest curator Michael J. DeLuca, featuring Emily Houk, Yukyan Lam, Krista Hoeppner Leahy, Marissa Lingen, Emery Robin, and Brian Francis Slattery. The event begins at 7:00 p.m. at The Brooklyn Commons Café, 388 Atlantic Avenue  (between Hoyt & Bond St.). Full info on Facebook.

Michael J. DeLuca‘s roots are mycorrhizal with sugar maple and Eastern white pine. He’s the publisher of Reckoning, an annual journal of creative writing on environmental justice. His fiction has appeared most recently in Beneath Ceaseless SkiesThree-Lobed Burning EyeStrangelet and Middle Planet

Emily Houk’s short fiction has appeared previously in Conjunctions, and she has just finished her first novel. She is coeditor of Ninepin Press, and she thrives in the shade of the library stacks of Western Massachusetts.

Yukyan Lam is based in New York, NY, and works for a non-profit on environmental health and social justice. Her scientific writing has appeared in various academic journals. She loves reading and writing creative non-fiction and short stories, and currently serves as a prose editor for Typehouse Literary Magazine. Follow her @yukyan_etc

Krista Hoeppner Leahy is a poet, writer, and actor. Her work has appeared in ClarkesworldFarrago’s WainscotLady Churchill’s Rosebud WristletRaritanShimmerTin HouseYear’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy and elsewhere. Born in Colorado, Krista currently resides in Brooklyn with her family.

Marissa Lingen is a freelance writer living in the suburbs of Minneapolis with two large men and one small dog. Mostly she writes speculative fiction. She has a large collection of foliage-themed jewelry.

Emery Robin is an Oakland-born and New York-based writer, previously published on Tor.com and in Spark: A Creative Anthology. When not busy reading, Emery is interested in propaganda, marginalia, and rock ‘n’ roll, and can be found on Twitter @ emwrobin .

Brian Francis Slattery is the arts editor and a reporter for the New Haven Independent. He has written four novels and is currently on the writing team of Bookburners, a serial fiction project. He’s also a musician and for a week out of every year, lives without electricity.

(2) JUNGLE CRUISE. Andrew Petersen, a student I met at Azusa Pacific University’s Yosemite Semester in 2001, achieved his goal of becoming a driver on the Jungle Cruise Ride. If only he hadn’t died last year – he would have gotten a kick out of this movie.  

Inspired by the famous Disneyland theme park ride, Disney’s JUNGLE CRUISE is an adventure-filled, Amazon-jungle expedition starring Dwayne Johnson as the charismatic riverboat captain and Emily Blunt as a determined explorer on a research mission. Also starring in the film are Edgar Ramirez, Jack Whitehall, with Jesse Plemons, and Paul Giamatti. Jaume Collet-Serra is the director and John Davis, John Fox, Dwayne Johnson, Hiram Garcia, Dany Garcia and Beau Flynn are the producers, with Doug Merrifield serving as executive producer. Disney’s JUNGLE CRUISE opens in U.S. theaters on July 24, 2020.

(3) PRINCIPLES OF WARFARE. At The Angry Staff Officer, Matthew Ader exercises 20/20 hindsight in “Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory on Wakanda”.

Captain Roger’s performance at the Battle of Wakanda has been widely and rightly panned. But nothing has been said about the profound failures of his enemy, the Thanosians. Despite every possible advantage in manpower, materiel, and circumstance, they still failed. All students of the military art should examine how they so masterfully snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. 

Terrain Analysis 

The Thanosians had complete freedom in the approach to battle. Nevertheless, they committed two grievous and unforced errors. First, they failed to identify the large energy shield protecting Benin Zana and its immediate environs. This information would have been known with even the most cursory reconnaissance. The mistake cost them at least a battalion worth of troops, when their dropship smashed into it. It is generally agreed that losing a sixth of your force before battle commences is a bad thing. ..

(4) KRAMER PLEADS NOT GUILTY. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports “Judge, others charged in Gwinnett hacking case enter not guilty pleas”.

All four defendants charged in Gwinnett County’s convoluted courthouse hacking saga entered not guilty pleas Thursday afternoon.

Each of the defendants — including sitting Superior Court Judge Kathryn Schrader and DragonCon co-founder Ed Kramer — were present for a brief arraignment hearing, scattered across the courtroom gallery as attorneys spoke on their behalf. Their not guilty pleas mean the case against them will move forward. The next hearing in the case is scheduled for Nov. 7….

(5) IMPERIAL SPONGEBOB. Holly M. Barker’s article for The Contemporary Pacific, “Unsettling SpongeBob and the Legacies of Violence on Bikini Bottom”, asserts the cartoon series normalizes an array or moral and ethical problems. Most of the piece is behind a paywall. Here is the abstract:

Billions of people around the globe are well-acquainted with SpongeBob Squarepants and the antics of the title character and his friends on Bikini Bottom. By the same token, there is an absence of public discourse about the whitewashing of violent American military activities through SpongeBob’s occupation and reclaiming of the bottom of Bikini Atoll’s lagoon. SpongeBob Squarepants and his friends play a role in normalizing the settler colonial takings of Indigenous lands while erasing the ancestral Bikinian people from their nonfictional homeland. This article exposes the complicity of popular culture in maintaining American military hegemonies in Oceania while amplifying the enduring indigeneity (Kauanui 2016) of the Marshallese people, who maintain deeply spiritual and historical connections to land—even land they cannot occupy due to residual radiation contamination from US nuclear weapons testing—through a range of cultural practices, including language, song, and weaving. This article also considers the gendered violence of nuclear colonialism and the resilience of Marshallese women.

Campus Reform’s post “Prof: SpongeBob perpetuates ‘violent, racist’ acts against indigenous people” elaborates on some of the issues, for example:  

… While Barker admits that the show’s creators likely did not have “U.S. colonialism” in mind while developing the cartoon, she calls it “disturbing” that they did not realize that “Bikini Bottom and Bikini Atoll were not theirs for the taking.” Consequently, Barker suggests that “millions of children” have “become acculturated to an ideology that includes the US character SpongeBob residing on another people’s homeland.” 

In this way, colonialism is supposedly “produced, reproduced, and normalized” through the cartoon

As if fictionally “occupying” nonfictional land was not enough, Barker also accuses the cartoon of being biased against women. 

The professor complains that “all of the main characters on the show are male,” except for Sandy Cheeks the squirrel, whom she suggests was only created in order to boost the gender diversity of the show. 

“The name ‘Bob’ represents the everyday man, a common American male, much like a ‘Joe,'” Barker observes, concluding that “our gaze into the world of Bikini Bottom, as well as the surface of Bikini, is thus filtered through the activities of men.”

Barker concludes her article by insisting that even though SpongeBob’s writers likely did not mean “to infuse a children’s show with racist, violent colonial practices,” the show is part of a larger issue, an “insidious practice of disappearing Indigenous communities.”

(6) DANIUS OBIT. Sara Danius has died due to breast cancer. She was the permanent secretary for the Swedish Academy during the MeToo era and who was forced out from it due to her determination to get rid of its toxic patriarchal working culture. She was 57 years old. (Swedish language news article here.)

(7) TODAY IN HISTORY.

  • October 12, 1987 Ultraman: The Adventure Begins. This Japanese animated film stars the English voice lead talents of Adrienne Barbeau and Stacy Keach.  Jr.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born October 12, 1875 Aleister Crowley. Genre writer? You decide. But I’ve no doubt that he had a great influence upon the genre as I’m betting many of you can note works in which he figures. One of the earliest such cases is Land of Mist, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle which was published in 1926. (Died 1947.)
  • Born October 12, 1903 Josephine Hutchinson. She was Elsa von Frankenstein with Basil Rathbone and Boris Karloff in Son of Frankenstein. She was in “I Sing the Body Electric”, The Twilight Zone episode written by Bradbury that he turned into a short story. (Died 1998.)
  • Born October 12, 1904 Lester Dent. Pulp-fiction author who was best known as the creator and main author of the series of novels chronicling Doc Savage. Of the one hundred and eighty-one  Doc Savage novels published by Street and Smith, one hundred and seventy-nine were credited to Kenneth Robeson; and all but twenty were written by Dent. (Died 1959.)
  • Born October 12, 1916 Lock Martin. His claim to fame was that he was one of the tallest humans that ever lived.  At seven feet and seven inches (though this was dispute by some), he was also quite stocky.  He had the distinction of playing Gort in The Day The Earth Stood Still. He was also in The Incredible Shrinking Man as a giant, but his scenes were deleted. And he shows up in Invaders from Mars as the Mutant carrying David to the Intelligence though he goes uncredited in the film. (Died 1959.)
  • Born October 12, 1924 Randy Stuart. She’s best remembered as Louise Carey, the wife of Scott Carey, in The Incredible Shrinking Man. She was also Frances Hiller in “Anniversary of a Murder“ on One Step Beyond which conceived as a companion series to the Twilight Zone. (Died 1996.)
  • Born October 12, 1942 Daliah Lavi. She’s in Casino Royale as The Detainer, a secret agent. In the same year, she was in Jules Verne’s Rocket to the Moon as Madelaine. She was Purificata in The Demon, an Italian horror film.  If you’re into German popular music, you might recognize her as she was successful there in Seventies and Eighties. (Died 2017.)
  • Born October 12, 1943 Linda Shaye, 76. She’s been an actress for over forty years and has appeared in over ninety films, mostly horror. Among them is A Nightmare on Elm StreetCritters, Insidious, Dead End2001 Maniacs and its sequel 2001 Maniacs: Field of ScreamsJekyll and Hyde… Together AgainAmityville: A New GenerationOuija, and its prequel Ouija: Origin of Evil. She even appeared in The Running Man as a Propaganda Officer
  • Born October 12, 1965 Dan Abnett, 54. His earlier work was actually on Doctor Who Magazine,  but I’ll single out his co-writing Guardians of the Galaxy #1–6 with Andy Lanning, The Authority: Rule Britannia and his Border Princes novel he did in the Torchwood universe as great looks at him as a writer. 
  • Born October 12, 1968 Hugh Jackman, 51. Obviously Wolverine in the Marvel film franchise. He’s also been the lead character in Van Helsing as well as voicing him in the animated prequel Van Helsing: The London Assignment. One of his most charming roles was voicing The Easter Bunny in The Rise of The Guardians. And he played Robert Angier in The Prestige based off the novel written by the real Christopher Priest.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

  • Rich Horton says about today’s Dilbert: “I don’t know if Scott Adams nicked this idea from Fred Pohl or Greg Egan or someone else, but I think of Daniel Galouye’s Simulacron-3 (filmed as The Thirteenth Floor).”

(10) THE ANSWER IS. Heather Rose Jones replies to the latest question on the Alpennia FAQ: “Are the Alpennia books historical?”

The setting deviates from real-world history in two major ways. Magic exists. And the country of Alpennia does not correspond to any real-world place or nation…. [More at the link.]

(11) WITH RESERVATIONS. CNET: “Addams Family fans can book ‘creepy, kooky’ night in replica mansion”. The “mansion” is in Brooklyn. Tagline: “Booking.com is offering a scary stay. Get a witch’s shawl on and a broomstick you can crawl on.”

…The exterior of Booking.com‘s Addams Family mansion doesn’t look spooky, but the inside makes up for it.

The [3700 square foot] mansion rents for just $101.10 per night, but not everyone interested will get in. [It will be available for only four one-night bookings starting the 29th of this month.] Mark your calendars now if you want to try to be one of the lucky ones. Bookings open on Oct. 28 at 9 a.m. PT, and they’ll probably disappear as fast as you can snap your fingers.

(12) KINGS AND MONSTERS. LitHub learns from Joe Hill, “When Stephen King is Your Father, the World is Full of Monsters”.

We had a new monster every night.

I had this book I loved, Bring on the Bad Guys. It was a big, chunky paperback collection of comic-book stories, and as you might guess from the title, it wasn’t much concerned with heroes. It was instead an anthology of tales about the worst of the worst, vile psychopaths with names like The Abomination and faces to match.

My dad had to read that book to me every night. He didn’t have a choice. It was one of these Scheherazade-type deals. If he didn’t read to me, I wouldn’t stay in bed. I’d slip out from under my Empire Strikes Back quilt and roam the house in my Spider-Man Underoos, soggy thumb in my mouth and my filthy comfort blanket tossed over one shoulder. I could roam all night if the mood took me. My father had to keep reading until my eyes were barely open, and even then, he could only escape by saying he was going to step out for a smoke and he’d be right back.

(13) THOUGHT YOU SHOULD KNOW. Behind a paywall at The Wall Street Journal: “Streaming Is Killing Physical Media. Here’s Why You Won’t Miss It “. Tagline: “With Samsung’s decision to stop making Blu-ray players, now even discs are going extinct. One writer reminisces about all we’ll lose. Another looks forward to an all-digital future.”

(14) FUTURIUM. Aa “house of futures” museum opened in Berlin last month called the Futurium, and their website is futurium.de. The home site is in German, however, they also offer an English language version.

Futurium celebrated its opening on 05 September 2019. Since then, the interest in the house of futures has exceeded all expectations. In the first month, 100,000 visitors already came to Futurium and devoted themselves to the question: How do we want to live?

(15) NOSFERATU. [Item by Steve Vertlieb.] Every generation has its incarnation of the vampire mythos – Dark Shadows, Twilight, True Blood, and more. But it all cinematically began with F.W. Murnau’s 1922 silent movie masterpiece Nosferatu. Ninety-four years after its inception, North Hollywood’s Crown City Theater Company unleashed an astonishing live stage presentation entitled Nosferatu: A Symphony in Terror. In Nosferatu”, film historian Steve Vertlieb takes us aboard a dark yet wonderful cinematic time machine, delving into the creation of Murnau’s seminal horror film, examining it’s influence on generations (from Lugosi and Lee, to Salem’s Lot, Harry Potter and more), then reviews the startling stage presentation from a few years ago.

 (16) ONE LESS BRICK IN THE WALL. CNN says “You can feel good about ditching your LEGO bricks thanks to this new program”.

…Gather the LEGO bricks, sets or elements that you want to part with; put them in a cardboard box; and print out a free shipping label from the LEGO Replay website. At the Give Back Box facility, they’ll be sorted, inspected and cleaned.

“We know people don’t throw away their LEGO bricks,” Tim Brooks, vice president of environmental responsibility at the LEGO Group, said in a Tuesday news release. “The vast majority hand them down to their children or grandchildren. But others have asked us for a safe way to dispose of or to donate their bricks. With Replay, they have an easy option that’s both sustainable and socially impactful.”

(17) MUSHROOM MANAGEMENT. Car ownership and use are dropping, so they’re “Turning Paris’s underground car parks into mushrooms farms” – the BBC has video.

What do you do with an old car park that no-one wants to park in? Why not use them to grow mushrooms – or even salad?

Paris built too many underground car parks in the 1960s and 70s. Falling car ownership means many are standing empty, or finding new and surprising uses.

(18) VIDEO OF THE DAY. In “Lauren Gunderson Is Taking On J.M. Barrie” on YouTube, Lauren Gunderson discusses her adaptation of Peter Pan, which will be produced by the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington in December.

[Thanks to Nancy Collins, Andrew Porter, Michael Toman, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, Chip Hitchcock, JJ, John King Tarpinian, Karl-Johan Norén, Steve Vertlieb, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Anne Sheller.]

65 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 10/12/19 “Have Fifth, Will Godstalk,” Reads The File Of A Man, A Scroll Without Pixels In A Fannish Land

  1. @Cliff: I’ve been precious before–I wouldn’t open for Flat Duo Jets because they had a major label contract–so I sympathize. I bet just putting the story above a city and a large lighted area would’ve satisfied them.

    I’m pretty bummed that, just when I’ve finally found people to play with, it’ll take $75 or more just to have my Musicmaster Bass looked at for that buzz. I’ve had it for forty years and traded three good records–two of which I no longer own–to get it. I may have to relearn electronics in self-defense.

  2. Oh, that sucks about your bass. Good luck fixing it. I tried taking a soldering iron to the innards of one of my guitars. Never again!

    What kind of stuff do you play?

  3. @bill: as regards the archival quality of LPs, I can agree in theory but in practice have to go along with Xtifr’s comments. I played my LPs a lot and boy did it show in the eventual degradation of the recorded sound. I have only one CD that no longer plays but I accept that they are nothing like as durable as was originally advertised. However, we can easily make exact duplicates of the files before this happens – not just mp3s of course – and the music just becomes another set of data to be safely backed up (with the advantage that, unlike, say, my photos, if I screw up the back ups I still have the physical copies to fall back on – unless the house burns down of course, which is why one has off site back up files).

    As for the different qualities of digital and analog recordings, declining hearing as one ages pretty much means that I can no longer detect any difference. Given the pretty much universal movement of music reproduction to low-fi, hearing loss is not totally disadvantageous.

  4. @John A. Arkansawyer: it sounds like you’re talking about the advantage of tubes in PA amps, not hi-fi. I played bass for only a few years (before realizing I didn’t have the background to be good at it) so never got entangled in gear debates, but I’ve heard lots about uses with electronic instruments; I’ve also heard hi-fi fans speaking of a “warmer” sound when the amp is supposed to be simply a medium rather than a part of the instrument.

  5. @Cliff: I was ambiguous, wasn’t I? It’s a Fender Musicmaster Bass amp. I also have a buzz in my Rick. I’m willing to tear into it if need be–I’ve done the same on my best friend’s Rick and lived to tell the tale–but the amp scares me. Anything running on 110/120 wall current scares me.

    I haven’t played much in years, but in 1980, I was in a band that played not one but three Lou Reed songs, if that gives you some idea. And “Stealin'” by Uriah Heep and “Nature’s Way” by Spirit. So non-hits of the sixties and seventies? The last band I was in did a lightly-ska-ified version of “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”. That sort of thing.

    Right now, I’m wanting to accompany myself solo singing “Tower of Song”. Love the song, hate the Casio, want to give it a latin feel by playing the backing singers’ part.

    God, I’m a weirdo.

  6. WRT to the audio quality of digital vs analog, solid state vs tube amps, etc. I used to worry about those details. Then, as part of my electrical engineering curriculum, I took an elective that included speaker design and analysis of other audio components. It turns out that the distortions created by these features in a moderately well-designed system are on the order of 0.1 to 1.0%. They are real, and they can be detected on good equipment. But the distortions created by good quality speakers is on the order of 1.0 to 10%, good quality headphones a little less. So the distortions created by even crappy electronics are negligible once they go through your speakers, even if they are high-quality speakers. The rule of thumb, spend half your money on speakers, was created with this in mind, and realistically half isn’t enough if you are optimizing for distortion.

    This is not to say that you can’t hear the difference between a good tube amp and a good solid-state amp. You may well be able to, and you may prefer the sound of a tube amp. That is your privilege — you like what you like. But it isn’t really justifiable to say that the sound coming out of speakers driven by tube amp is objectively “better” than the sound coming out of speakers driven by a solid-state amp; all the measurable distortion at that point comes from the speakers themselves. The errors introduced by the speakers dominate everything.

    30 or so years ago, I had a friend who used a betamax video recorder for audio purposes. He had done the analysis, and the THD, the wow/flutter, etc. were better than everything he could get except CD’s, and they weren’t too shabby compared to that. But blank betamax tapes were cheap (they were in the process of losing the VCR wars to VHS, despite having better technical specs), and he could record 6 hours at a whack, which tipped the scales in his mind.

    @Mike — I agree that in principle, digital files don’t degrade over time or with use. But practically speaking, digital files have a half-life just like analog media do. Nearly all of the digital files I have accumulated from the last year, I still have. The ones from five years ago, I still have most of them. From 10 years ago, it starts being less certain, and from 20 years ago, I don’t have most of them. To keep a long term digital library requires a certain amount of scheduled maintenance, file duplicating, organized hardware and software back up protocols, off-site storage, etc. If you put the same effort and attention into maintaining a vinyl LP library, you will be able to keep it about as well (and by effort and attention, I mean using quality needles and turntables, keeping the discs in high quality sleeves, cleaning the discs when appropriate, etc.)

  7. @bill — as a former audiophile and radio engineer, ISTM that all of the steps you describe for preserving LPs require manual labor on a continuing basis (not to mention the difficulty of merely not damaging the discs for those of us with sub-average dexterity); the steps you list for digital data should be largely automatable with current tech (as I understand it — I’m grievously careless about protecting data on my home systems). I’ll note that by simple sneakernet (over 3 jobs), I still have all the interesting data that I had on work systems as much as 40 years ago; dealing with it on a PC will be a pain, but that’s because PC OSs think they know how you should do things.

  8. @John – very cool. I confess I haven’t heard of any of those songs! But hopefully you’ll be back out playing now you’ve found a new group of people to play with?

    I did wonder at first whether you meant a bass amp, and then somehow convinced myself otherwise. I started out with a Rickenbacker bass myself (was a big fan of Rush) but switched to guitar after two or three years.

    @Bill – I’ve heard the same thing said of guitar rigs. Even when the desire is to overdrive an amp to provide sustain and a clipped signal, the speaker still plays a large part in shaping the overall sound.

  9. @Cliff: It’s understandable confusion. Fender made a Musicmaster Bass, Guitar, and Bass amp. I never think of the Bass, because I’ve never knowingly seen one.

    I do plan to start playing with people again. I’ve had such a hard time meeting folks in Little Rock. I have work friends, church friends, and bus friends, but hardly any of them are friends outside those contexts. And then the damnedest thing happened this weekend at church!

    We (the choir) sang for a memorial service of an elderly member who’d moved here recently to be with her sons. After the service, a guy approached me and called me by a family name I thought no one in Little Rock knew! It was briefly unsettling, like the first time I was called by my punk rock name by a co-worker when I was a Wl-Mrt vendor.

    After I closed my mouth and looked closely, I realized it was my ex-cousin-in-law! I seldom see him since the divorce. I like him a lot, but it was a contentious breakup, and the kids have lives that take them other places, so we’ve drifted apart. It turned out he was friends with one of the woman’s sons.

    And then it turned out that so were two musicians I’d known back in the day (as had the kid’s mom)–like a quarter-century ago–in Fayetteville, who were also in attendance. So I got to talk with old friends, which led to deeper conversations with the sons than I normally might’ve had. One of the sons plays in bands locally.

    And we’re getting together to jam at our earliest opportunity.

    It felt a little odd, because I’ve missed four memorial services in the last year I should’ve been at, two people who wrote for me, a fellow musician, and a dear member of the church. One death I didn’t know about until literally the day of the service three hours away, so I give myself a pass there, but about the other three, I felt like a shitty person.

    So it felt a little wrong that I was being rewarded for showing up to sing for a woman I liked but hardly knew. I know it’s just chance, but that’s not how I perceive it. On the other hand, I did do the right thing by showing up, so maybe I should just look at this as a fresh start. That’s the meaning I’ll try to impose on this chaos.

  10. I was at a memorial service for my auntie recently. Not being a church-goer, I surprised to see so many members of the congregation there to sing who weren’t family, and I thought it a really decent gesture on their behalf.

    At any rate, it sounds to me that what happened to you is a good thing.

  11. @John A Arkansawyer: I’ve heard it said that half of life is just showing up; sometimes that’s true.

  12. @Chip Hitchcock
    I don’t see the steps required as anything close to “manual labor” (for me, manual labor involves lifting heavy things, exertion, etc.). To play an LP at all, you take it out of the sleeve/jacket, place it on the turntable, listen, and replace it. The only additional step I outlined above would be to replace at purchase the factory paper sleeve with a better one, and occasionally run a cleaning brush over the surface of the record after you’ve placed it on the turntable; everything else is just being careful, which I’ve always done anyway. (My high school job was working in a used record store, so these steps come naturally to me.)

    CD’s also require care — keep them in the jewel boxes, handle by the edges, etc. But even so, sometimes they just die. At least, vinyl doesn’t do that.

    Keeping a digital library alive at a minimum means moving everything from one storage device to another at regular intervals (which should be less than the life of the device hosting them — I hope you estimate that correctly!) I upgrade laptops every few years, and the most cumbersome part of the process is moving 100’s of GB of files from the old to the new.

    It may be that your practice is automated in some way; you may have software that dumps your computer to auxiliary storage on a regular basis, and you upgrade/replace those hard drives regularly (or you subscribe to an online/cloud equivalent). If that is part of your routine, you may not see that as “extra effort” but rather as simply how one manages a digital lifestyle. Likewise, I don’t see the steps involved in maintaining a vinyl collection as burdensome; they are just part and parcel of having and playing the records.

    My point is that if all you do is acquire the music, and then do nothing else, someday you won’t have it. regardless of the medium on which the music exists. The albums may wear out and become scratchy, or the device the files live on may crash (or the service from which you “license” them may go away). I don’t see the level of effort involved with vinyl vs. digital as being significantly different from each other. It is more an attitude of “I will maintain this music”, and once you’ve made that step, the actual work is not too onerous

  13. @bill: I can’t put my financial records on vinyl. I can’t put precious family photos on vinyl. The last pictures I took of my mother aren’t on vinyl. I can’t put my books on vinyl. I can’t even put all my music on vinyl: jam sessions with friends, or just recordings of friends’ bands. I have no way to get that on vinyl. All that stuff is on my computer, and is precious, and much of it is irreplaceable–unlike pretty much anything I’ve ever owned on vinyl.

    So keeping my data safe and backed up is already a top priority, and tossing the rest of my music into that mix is trivial. Easier than not, in fact. And thumb drives are dirt cheap these days. No reason not to make multiple backups. Regularly.

    But if you’re already backing up your data–all your data–then the steps involved in taking care of a collection of vinyl is always extra work.

    That said, if you love taking care of vinyl–and it sounds like that’s the case–then you should absolutely take care of your vinyl, and revel in every moment of it. Life’s too short to skip the simple pleasures. 🙂

  14. @bill: s/manual labor/exercises of dexterity/, if you must. And while I’ve only had one CD die (it was relatively new, made by an amateur, and possibly mistreated), vinyl dies by inches. As @Xtifr says, you do you — but don’t think your solution wins for the rest of us.

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