12mo ago

You had to hold it up to a candle.

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I just bought an external CD/DVD read/write. When I built my most recent PC it didn’t have external bays, and I didn’t even worry about it. Changing my tune.
I have a lot of older games on CD, music files, and movies.
The games I actually own, that can’t be randomly shut off by lack of support. Music files not tied to a streaming service. Movies I can rip and put on my own home media server.
That old tech is still useful. It’s from an age before you “rented” your music, movies (blockbuster notwithstanding), and games.
- Yup recently converted back to having a dvdbluray burner once some of my favourite movies were removed suddenly off of a streaming service. Nope. Not letting that shit happen again. At least with blueray and dvds if I do pay, I pay once and I can enjoy it for a life time. I think cd envelopes will be making a comeback since the end stage enshitification has reached all streaming services now.
- I don't like this binary choice between "not owning things" vs. "owning them on physical media". You can own things in digital format, y'know? All media I have on my drives is also not tied to some service since it's all DRM-less. I did buy some things on Steam, but for each such game I have a DRM-less version that I do truly own. And a stash of external drives takes up way less space than CDs and is way more convenient to use.
  Especially since some physical media also has bullshit like DRM.
  
  You can own things in digital format, y’know? All media I have on my drives is also not tied to some service since it’s all DRM-less
  I think they mean that it requires an effort. In particular, for ebooks it requires to be outside the Amazon ecosystem, where they can delete remotely your books if they lost the right to sell them.
  
  I don't think Amazon ecosystem requires less effort. Not only does it require paying (with a card!) for each book, but I don't even know if it would work on non-Kindle devices.
  
  I don't think Amazon ecosystem requires less effort
  I said exactly the opposite.

373 comments