With some content appearing as “digital only”, finding dvd box sets can’t get you a full collection, and aren’t the only thing that can be done in defiance of streaming companies letting you see what they want you to see.

Of course the New Yorker can’t publish this, but there is another de-centralized content distribution system to help preserve digital media, if you catch my drift, matey.

This is a problem with anime as a lot of older series and dubs have had their licenses expire and the services didn’t renew them. Coupled with the fact that the media is out of print (if there was any to begin with) and series are lost to the void.

I’ve started ripping all of my discs so that I have my own “Netflix”. It’s time consuming, but they can never take it away from me.

Thus, physical media take on an essentially political role as the basis for samizdat, for the preservation in private of what’s neglected or suppressed or destroyed in the public realm, be it through mercantile vandalism, doctrinaire censorship, or technological apocalypse.

What an excellent concept, and it even has a name: samizdat. I feel like I’ve uncovered a little piece of history.

I find streaming services choose more what I don’t watch.

I’ve come across this streaming platform limitation problem a lot. I’m not tied to any particular streaming services, but a lot of the post-2019 (or so) media found on them is completely unknown to everyone, including people who have those services. It’s wild how difficult it is to find copies of some real gems, because they launched on some obscure site or minor-market-share service, and basically died.

People who do happen to have those minor platforms usually don’t use them as much as the bigger ones, or they swap between platforms so frequently they miss stuff that’s not new or whatever it happens to be, but whatever the cause, the effect is that a lot of media, even stuff available right now on streaming, is almost impossible to find (even on a ship!) and nobody has heard of it.

I used to assume that obscure media is bad, and that used to be sort of mostly true, but it isn’t anymore. Obscure now just means it’s newer and wasn’t advertised heavily, which is most of it, or is in rights limbo.