videocassettes

Feature photo: six US videocassettes in their original packaging

If you, as a self-confessed hunter and collector, who in a very special form are often referred to as messies, have to make do with limited space, you are always forced to part with loved ones. You can also make a positive trait out of this emergency, and so I have written about death cleaning for a long time, among other things here: “My minimalism project" or here: "Bescheidenheit. "

You just make a virtue out of necessity. This is certainly a way of dealing with emergencies, and this way has proven itself over the millennia. In the USA, a different solution was chosen a few decades ago and “public storage” was set up everywhere. Interestingly, this was also a topic during our last stay in California, and so once again my lived impressions and what I wrote as a blog post go together quite well.

My biggest death cleaning project so far was moving back to Heilbronn at the end of 2014. After that, after a good five more years in Heilbronn, I sacrificed the bulk of my own library, with hundreds of books ultimately ending up in the trash. And after I recently threw away the last VCR, my cassette-based video library fell victim to cleaning, too. In contrast to the books, I still thought that the films would have appealed to my fellow citizens and offered them to the second-hand circuit for recycling, but to no avail, since even the Blu-ray Disc had gone out of fashion in the meantime .

And so the video cassettes also ended up in the garbage, even those that were still in their original packaging, which I only owned because my passion for collecting made sure that I also had duplicates. And so today I was amazed to read that the movie Back to the Future was worth $75 to a collector on a videotape.

Such actions may also explain why so many people cling to public storage or are even fortunate enough to have sufficient storage of their own and also use it. A quick look into my office revealed that six video cassettes still survived my recent tidying mania — to put it more nicely: my progress in death cleaning, the aforementioned minimalism project.

And should an interested collector be found, I'd be happy if I didn't have to throw those six videocassettes in the trash as well.

A few years ago I ran my own website about movies, similar to what "liegeradler" continues to run about cinemas. I also had a very extensive collection of film quotes there. Both fell victim to my clean-up years ago.

A few of the film quotes I collected back then are still available as a blog post on this weblog; I couldn't just part with it 100% and saved a few quotes in this weblog. The corresponding blog post can be found here.