For work, I’ve been living in different city during weeks and another during the weekend. Understandably, the place I have for weekdays doesn’t have much stuff. I only have a bed, a desk, a chair and a beanbag chair as well as some books there. Not much. Not even lights for all the places I should have. Quite Spartan, in fact. The thing is, I don’t seem to miss all that stuff that much.

… and I have a lot of stuff. more than 2000 movies on DVD, roughly the same number of CDs of music, I don’t know how many books, but hundreds, including 80 or so oWoD books I practically never even open anymore, around 130 boardgames, and plenty of furniture, if that needs mentioning. The point is, I have a shitload of stuff, I don’t really even need.

This is partly because of Internet. I stream music, movies and TV shows from there. Since I’m away from home most of the time, my social life happens on the Internet as well. So, there’s another aspect of life Internet has completely changed.

Anyhow, we, as nerds, have a strong tendency to collect stuff. For me, and many of the true nerds out there, its about endless curiosity. I like to know stuff. How did Genghis Khan’s empire really affect civilizations across Eurasia? What kind of mental problems did Finnish soldiers suffer from during and after WWII? How much does a drug dealer actually make? Well, there’s books that delve in to these subjects. Is my local library stocked well enough to carry these books? Maybe some, but not all. So, I buy them.

Many other nerds feel strong attachment to different franchises and characters out there, so they spend their money to collect things around those things. Mostly not in the way popular culture would have you believe, but yes, we do love that stuff.

And we love games. A lot of games. Those take a lot of room. I actually moved into a bigger apartment accommodate them all around six years ago.. Well, there were other reasons as well, but that was a major one.

Anyhow, I have plenty of stuff and I’m finding out I don’t really even apparently want it. So, suppose my situation changed again and I’d move completely to a new city. Should I or could I just get rid of all that stuff? Or most of it? Probably should. I mean I know I don’t really need it all and especially my CDs are completely worthless now. Well, mostly, there’s some interesting ones in there somewhere that aren’t available for streaming, but they are a huge minority.

Am I going to get rid of them? Probably not. At least not all of it. I’ve put a lot of effort into my DVD collection over the years. I know its quickly becoming a completely obsolete technology, but at the same time, I have hundreds of movies in there somewhere, that just aren’t available on streaming services. At least not in Finland, which is quite a small market afterall. Its not like NetFlix Finland is clamoring to get Bed Sitting Room, Daisies or Dogtooth onto their selection.

So, in a way, maybe I don’t collect movies. I collect strange cultural artifacts instead. I could maybe convince myself of this, if I didn’t have plenty of huge commercial hits in there as well. Still, its not those movies that keep me from getting rid of the whole collection. Its those genre-defining East European films like Kontroll, completely fucked up visuals in Silent Hill, and huge stars of yesteryear coming together to do a little weird movie about excess in La Grande Bouffe that keep me acquiring more movies and not letting go of the ones I have.