PSA: Life is short. Don't spend too much time obsessively cataloguing your data collections.
PSA: Life is short. Don't spend too much time obsessively cataloguing your data collections.
Over the last 2 years, I've noticed that I spend WAY more time carefully cataloguing my collections of digital media (games, anime) than actually experiencing those media.
I would spend months carefully renaming the files, grouping them into folders by franchise, creating watch order files, remuxing videos so they would only have one audio and one subtitle file, reencoding videos that I considered bloated, reencoding videos that had flac or 5.1 audio to opus stereo, putting all my files into a spreadsheet along with other information, etc. etc.
Today I realized that my obsession is pointless. I'm just wasting my life doing something that's not enjoyable, instead of experiencing the media I've collected. Who am I making those neat-looking catalogues for? I will never pass on my collection to anyone. I am just lost in my unhealthy obsession instead of enjoying life.
So yeah. Today I've decided to stop wasting my time. I will keep archiving (because I believe that in the future, the governments will make it very difficult to share copyrighted media online), but I will stop trying to make my collection look nice and tidy.
I will also delete stuff that I've watched/played that I didn't enjoy. I've come to a realization there's no point archiving it if I'm never going to use it again.
Anyways, I hope this helps someone realize that obsessions with cataloguing your hoards are unhealthy and a waste of life.
You're viewing a single thread.
To an extent, I agree. For me, if I was out of control, I'd label every single movie, short and episode file with release date and category.
Instead, I just have a folder for movies, a folder for each TV series and a folder for each producer/distributor of golden age animated shorts, that's good enough for me.
Oh and focusing on the media that is actually good and/or at least in my wheelhouse of interest helps in ensuring there's some space left on my 22TB hard drive, instead of downloading everything just because.