Old, Valued Things that nobody really cares about anymore

Grandma's china set... The old pump organ... Mother's mink stole... the steamer chest brought over from the old country

Do you have things you feel like you need to hold onto for reasons that aren't even sentimental anymore? I remember this steamer trunk we seemed to drag around for years, eventually acting as a TV stand. Everyone thought they were worth money but they're actually not worth shit. A lot of 'antique' stuff is just not wanted anymore, especially big heavy oak wardrobes and the like

List the treasured family heirlooms that are just dead weight to you at this point.. bonus for pictures

Went through this with both my mom and my grandmother (her mom). My sister tried to sell some things online, just gave up after a while. My grandmother used to collect those tiny spoons; they're on my kitchen wall now. I'll be leaving a warehouseful of dead weight when I check out, but--like many ILX'ers, I assume--in the form of physical media, not what the thread's about. In the furniture/heirloom/antiques department, I won't be much of a burden.

one thing that kinda troubles me is my late dad's college yearbooks: Humboldt State University, circa late 50's-early 60's. Apparently when Raymond Carver attended... they're probably worth something to somebody, but not me. I have them in a trunk, and I won't toss them out, but I'd like to find a reseller to get them into somebody's hands who would actually value them

Having once tried unsuccessfully to acquire some yearbooks from my own high school days--about 15 years after the fact, with an ad in a local paper--I think there is a demand for that if you figure out how best to reach people (especially if someone famous is in there).

My grandmother's spoons--I think they're very cool.

https://i.postimg.cc/26rv24yh/spoons.jpg

aww, those are cute.. and barely take up any space at all. I would hold on to the them unless you're sick of 'em

They'll be with me till someone else has to figure out what to do with them.

so weird that people used to collect shit like that just for collecting.. I guess people still do. I have a friend that collect giant japanese robot toys and then won't let anyone play with them

My grandfather’s duck shotgun. It’s not even worth anything, really.

Family stuff in general. I’m not having kids and I have no nieces or nephews so it’s going to a landfill when I keel over. I don’t get anything from the stuff but I’d feel guilty if I got rid of it.

Want myself and everything I own to become dust

Irrational as it might be, I want the opposite. No kids, but I want traces of me to live on--in stuff I've written, Zooms I've posted on YouTube, maybe my records and baseball books (ideally kept intact...no idea how that happens), something. Even though I'll be dead and will never know.

…and to VG, clemenza bequeaths his (checks notes) “Zooms he posted on youtube”

Sad, I know--my legacy resides inside a website that gave the world funny cat videos.

<3

i've now cleaned out the houses of two parents, both of whom were hoarders.

it's awkward to come to terms with, but none of that shit is worth anything and no one wants it.

i value knowing clemenza, even if i occasionally disagree with him about certain baseball stats/xgau. imo being a friend is incredibly worthwhile even if it doesn't necessarily 'leave traces' of one's passing

I do appreciate that, and this is something I grapple with constantly (good thread for thinking about this stuff): too much time not living in the moment, worrying about what I leave behind, including all the Old, Valued Things That No One Wants and Nobody Really Cares About Anymore. My sister lives entirely in the moment. I remember I was changing classrooms once, putting one thing and one folder after another to the side--"I might use that one day"--while one of my teaching partners was forcibly taking stuff from my hands and, with much laughter, tossing it into the garbage.

feeb liberal political parties

AtG, that's a good point; shit like funkopops, gundam models and warhammer figures are going to be the porcelain puppies, commemorative plates and souvineer spoons of 2075...

The charity shops of the late 21st century are going to be desolate. Although having said that, some charity shops are like that right now. A few years ago in a charity shop I saw a signed framed photo of Ant & Dec (UK TV presenters). Was that someone's valued thing at one point?

Ok a signed Ant & Dec poster would be a decent joke gift I reckon.

Useful things only need a fraction of a lifespan to get obsolete, so in absence of valuables and with the uncertainty of fashion revivals, trinkets act as funny testimonials. Anything you have lived with holds some value. Maybe it reminded them of people they met, things they dreamt of, places they couldn't travel to.

I say that, but I also hate junk.

ILX

Turned 50 last year and still getting the hang of it - but one of my firm preliminary conclusions was “get rid of all this STUFF man”

Definitely hoarding tendencies in my family and I don’t wanna saddle my kids with a mountain of old crap - I actually feel really fortunate to live in the era of eBay and FB Marketplace* just because it makes getting rid of stuff so viable.

*obviously also evil but if you wanna sell stuff fast it is the only game in (my) town

I've only got a couple of family things to remember my late parents by. The most treasured, for sentimental reasons, one is a painting that my mum bought at a school art fair in Africa. I keep it because I remember us going into the building, her looking at paintings and choosing and buying this one. Over 50 years ago!

https://i.imgur.com/tCBw8Yh.jpeg

Re the yearbooks — genealogy people want those things ime … idk try the Mormon church lol … my late uncle ended up after a few decades in journalism as an antiquarian book dealer specializing in stuff like that and many of his clients were mormon. Granted your dad and his former classmates would risk being post-mortem mormonized… idk.

I am having these conversations with my mom — the stuff conversations— how she actually is not a hoarder, she’s just a normal person born in the 40s who has a normal amount of clutter and bulky furniture.

My additions to the list: firewire cables, cookbooks (mom hasn’t brought up the cookbooks yet though the oak dresser, grandma’s rocking chair, and the wedding china have been discussed).

I worked at a history museum in San Jose for a while. The most common donation inquiries were asking if we wanted pianos or sewing machines. We had too many of both and wanted no more.

This 2017 article from The Takeout on exactly this subject has always stuck with me.

I bought a small, fancy Wedgwood dinner service a few years ago, which I use at Christmas or on other special occasions. I'm sure someone has the other half of what was probably originally a massive twelve-person set.

I like the suggestions of just using the china, even if the patterns wear off in the dishwasher. I have some antique epns soup spoons that are not rated for the dishwasher, but I put them in there anyway and they seem fine. Or just keeping one and getting rid of the rest.

I have a bunch of old RAM sticks, and even a couple of mid-2000s CPUs that were left over after upgrading a couple of laptops. I came close to having enough spare components to build an entirely separate computer at one point. But getting hold of a period-correct Pentium M motherboard is hard, and even if I had the components, what then? And yet perhaps one day I might find an AOpen XC Cube case lying by the roadside.

I also have a Power Macintosh G5, which is too awesome to throw away, too heavy to move around, too old-fashioned and power-hungry to actually use. It's essentially an object d'art. It was state-of-the-art in 2003. 64-bit. Two entirely separate processors. Twin hard drive bays. Nine fans. Aluminium case.

I remember reading posts on Photo.net in the 2000s. I remember one user boasting about his film storage cabinet. It was air conditioned and had separate shelves for all of his negatives. Light-sealed to stop the pigments from degrading. From what I remember his photos were uninteresting snapshots of municipal buildings in Wyoming or whatever. He was convinced that his kids were going to look after it all when he was dead and gone. I sometimes wonder how long his kids kept it going until they threw it all out.

The article is weird to me because I have never really been into rituals like that … my family had/has some, but I don’t think I have ever found reassurance or pleasure in them. … especially around stuff like dishes or other “presentation” aspects of food. It’s not that I am unsentimental either … I have and still use my mom’s 30+ year old mikita drill with her name engraved on it.

Selling off a late acquaintance's vast record collection a few years ago led me to the belief that a 'collection' is a very personal thing, and any meaning it has as a totality is inextricably linked to the person that owned it. Once they're gone it reverts to a pile of individual (and probably mass-produced) items that can be safely broken down into its constituent parts and kept/disposed of as desired. This would go for family heirlooms etc too of course.

In other words: keep the photos and allow yourself a few (small!) items, give the rest a little mental funeral and get shot of it. Otherwise it'll bog you down until the day you, yourself, die. This goes for your own pointless shit you're hanging onto for reasons unknown too.

Pertinently, I rarely practice what I preach with all this.

My mom is the queen of having her grandmother's glass serving bowl and her great-grandmother's needlepoint chair that was brought from England as part of a set, and my literal handmade baby dresses (which I just gave to someone who's having a girl type baby soon) and all of that stuff. They're totems for her. When she touches them she sees her grandmother's hands, her mother's kitchen, my infant self. Because I love her so much, I'm floored by the religious observance of it. It's almost like a spiritual practice for her, holding us all in her memory to be called up by these imbued objects.

Idk. It's not for me but I also haven't lost my mother yet. Ask me again when I can't touch her anymore and I just have a bowl and a lifetime of love with nowhere to go.

it's always best to start early on dumping stuff (everyone on the board is old now and if our parents aren't gone they're closer to the end of their journeys than not...) and by doing so you create life WITHOUT those things, so you don't miss them in the end because time marches on. i thought my grandmother had 'stuff' but not 'STUFF' - imagine my surprise when we were clearing out her house and all the drawers exploded like cans of snakes.

I have an acquaintance that runs estate sales locally, and I used to check them out when I was still in acquisition mode.. a lot of retired Berkeley professors' homes, that kind of thing... often beautiful mid-century houses. It's strange to see what's left after the family has taken the things that they want. And if does feel kinda creepy wandering through the emptying house, picking over things like seagulls on a beached whale.

The sales would usually start on Fridays at full price, and that's when the pros would come in, the resellers looking for certain valuable things (jade was really big for some reason). And then saturday would be 1/3 off, sundays 1/2 off.

I went to one that was clearly a friend or associate of Alice Waters, they had signed ephemera from the opening day of Chez Panisse.. lots of cool kitchen stuff. Just an entire lifetime of stuff and a bunch of strangers picking through it. Now I have their italian glass locking jar that I use for tea bags, it was full of ancient bay leaves when I bought it.

Otherwise it'll bog you down until the day you, yourself, die. This goes for your own pointless shit you're hanging onto for reasons unknown too.

see: Swedish Death Cleaning

I'm very much on the side of minimizing possessions to those that have a real place in your life-as-you-currently-live-it. Unfortunately I married someone who, while not a hoarder, has stronger attachments to outdated stuff. She inclines to the both the I-might-need-it-someday school and the sentimental-value school when it comes to keeping stuff. We've come to a modest accommodation around this, but when we move out of our current house into some assisted living apartment setup there'll still be a ton of shit to toss.

see: Swedish Death Cleaning

Yeah I'm not a minimalist, I like having things around that make me happy and make my life feel aesthetically good, but I think the experience of having to unload the previous generation's STUFF is also a particular historical moment. Our last few past generations lived under conditions where it was possible (even socially advisable) to accumulate all that stuff as evidence of a "good" life. Why did my grandma collect decorative tea cups???? Idk but her mom survived the Depression and couldn't throw away a piece of string so everyone is dealing with some shit here.

yeah, there's definitely some inherited trauma around the Great Depression! I had some uncles that could not throw out a length of bailing wire, it went into a cupboard with the other lengths of bailing wire

I don’t think it’s the Great Depression it’s just been generations of an over abundance of objects…like, why would I want my family dishes when I could get dishes at goodwill or target or … Temu. These things are so cheap in relation to income they don’t have the value they once had …

I've been paring stuff down for over a decade, since I mentioned to my daughter and son that I had the big oak dining table and chairs (from 1910! With the original shipping label still attached!) in storage for whichever of them wanted it. Neither did, and though they were kind about it I understood there was nothing of my stuff they wanted to deal with. The table went to lxy and jergins, put to use for art space.

I've been unsuccessful getting Mr. Jaq to stop bringing home physical media. No one will value the books, vinyl, CDs, DVDs, etc enough to want them for what he believes they are worth; no one is going to individually sell them on eBay or whatever after he's gone; no one is likely to read or listen to or watch these things. Maybe a few people will want one of these things as a token of remembrance. But none go out and more come in every year.

Maybe I'm wrong and things will be different - society will collapse enough that all of this will represent wealth and status and hoards of treasure. But I feel the "seagulls on a beached whale corpse" will be much more probable.

I've quoted this before (so had easy access to the exact quote), from The Worst Person in the World--seems especially pertinent to this thread:

"The world that I knew...has disappeared. For me it was all about going to stores. Record stores. I'd take the tram to Voices in Grünerløkka. Leaf through used comics at Pretty Price. I can close my eyes and see the aisles at Video Nova in Majorstua. I grew up in a time when culture was passed along through objects. They were interesting because we could live among them. We could pick them up. Hold them in our hands. Compare them...I spent my life doing that. Collecting all that stuff, comics, books, and I just continued, even when it stopped giving me the powerful emotions I felt in my early 20s. I continued anyway. And now it's all I have left. Knowledge and memories of stupid, futile things nobody cares about."

Almost the exact thread title.

My maternal grandmother was too young for the Depression but I think wartime and postwar rationing definitely affected her outlook on valuing stuff. But yeah, globalisation making shit cheap is probably the bigger factor.

Definitely. There's a way in which the older stuff is "nicer" -- handmade, almost certainly better quality, has lasted all this time whereas today's particle board and plastic shit will only be useful for a year or two and will pollute the planet in its disposal. That's the kind of stuff my family has that I'll probably have to deal with (or someone else already has slowly pared down). I don't have the physical media problem so much except for some books.

Although speaking of books I talked to someone recently who thinks we urgently need to preserve and protect books right now because access to knowledge will be increasingly restricted. Hard to argue with tbh.

here's a sad story of an old man who lived across the street from me and was hit & killed by a car (in a crosswalk), his little dog was also killed.. maybe about a year ago
Anyway, they put a dumpster on the sidewalk below the window and just tossed everything in his apartment into that dumpster. A lifetime of acquisitions (his wife shortly preceded him in death I believe)... no estate sale, just right into the dump. I was almost tempted to see what was in the dumpster but it was all a little too sad

Haha my mom said "When I go please don't let everyone paw over my stuff at a yard sale" and my sister and I looked at each other and were like "............................" lol

I have my grandfather's black tailcoat jacket. It's made from EXTREMELY heavy wool. Amazingly it has no moth holes that I can discover. He probably only ever wore it a couple of times. To some big fancy event, obviously, but what? Surely it must have been pre-war. Now there is a fashion that is never, ever coming back. It is one of these things that at one time was worth quite a bit - not just sentimentally, but just as a very desirable, high-end object, and is now worthless.

Big heavy wardrobes still worth quite a bit in Europe, where built-in closets are still a novelty!

That fabric is still something unique that probably can't be made any more for *~*reasons*!* and could be repurposed!

Ha--just turned up on my FB wall, some group called "American Memory Lane." Makes me wonder again if their algorithms are reaching into my activity on threads like this.

https://i.postimg.cc/7ZWKg20M/past.jpg

(I guess there's other activity from me that suggests I might be interested in such a group, horrendous name aside.)

Once Wikipedia gets bought up by some billionaire tech bro who proceeds to flood the site with AI tripe, Encyclopedia Brittanicas will be the only reliable source of information in the world. You heard it here first!

a 'collection' is a very personal thing, and any meaning it has as a totality is inextricably linked to the person that owned it. Once they're gone it reverts to a pile of individual (and probably mass-produced) items that can be safely broken down into its constituent parts and kept/disposed of as desired.

a 'consciousness' is a very personal thing, and any meaning it has as a totality is inextricably linked to the person that owned it. Once they're gone it reverts to a pile of individual (and probably mass-produced) items that can be safely broken down into its constituent parts and kept/disposed of as desired.

I have two sets of encyclopedias downstairs. I remember buying a couple of second-hand sets for the classroom in the '90s, before tech in every classroom was a given. It felt like having them there really set our classroom apart.

World Book? Brittanica? Fuckin Rag Dolls?

We had a set of Collier's Encyclopedia that got water-damaged when I was older, was sad to see it go. But the 10-volume "Young Folks' Shelf of Books" that came with the encylopedias is still with me.

I had a complete set of Charlie Brown ‘Cyclopedias when I was a kid and my mom kept them and gave them back to me. My younger kid had me read all of them to her. Some of it was out of date but that lead to some fun discussions.

I wonder if Encyclopedia Browns will fetch more than Britannicas on the resale market...

(xposts) In honour of Laugh-in, I have 1956 set of Funk & Wagnalls downstairs, inherited from my Dad's side of the family. This set:

https://i.postimg.cc/4NHZhMKS/funk.jpg

There's a time-worn bit about being poor and buying an encyclopedia one volume at a time.

One year all your school papers were about aardvarks, the next year about beavers, and so on.

I was looking at a Greta Garbo clip on youtube today and wondered if the 'classic age' of early cinema is going this way.. maybe some old white guy film snobs are still watching these movies but nobody else gives a shit about them

sad if true

I'd figure some of that is kind of hard to find. I was wanting to go back and check out a bunch of Bogart movies I saw as a kid and in college and outside the really big ones, hard to find them streaming in the usual suspects.

A lot is on YouTube

Sorry, I meant old Hollywood generally – don't mean to to suggest all the Bogart films you wanted are as I'm sure you looked.

I mean, I don't think lack of availability is the real reason people aren't watching films from the 30s and 40s much anymore.

Criterion et al have really tried to keep some of this stuff available on streaming but I just wonder if the demand is diminishing in general

Like everybody (who's into film) reads about Battleship Potemkin and knows a little bit about the iconic scenes, but how long will people actually watch the entire picture?

it has never been easier to access old movies than now... *someone* is invested in putting all this stuff out there.

well, especially if it's outside copyright protections

I imagine it's true with novels as well.. do people still read Silas Marner anymore? probably not

honestly i remember people thinking black and white movies were "old" and "boring" since i was a kid... if they're not available for streaming, i think that has more to do with the streaming situation being what it is. a lot of people i know have just started pirating things again. (not me - i never stopped pirating things in the first place)

I was looking at a Greta Garbo clip on youtube today and wondered if the 'classic age' of early cinema is going this way.. maybe some old white guy film snobs are still watching these movies but nobody else gives a shit about them

sad if true

― Andy the Grasshopper, Saturday, August 2, 2025

My best friend, an old white guy film snob, is a film historian who wrote two books about Garbo! He considers her one of the greatest film icons of all time. And I can see his point. She did her bit and made history and then disappeared and became a mystery.

She had to have been an Enneagram 5, an introvert whose need for privacy was among her primary concerns. She lived on the east side in NY for many years incognito after her fame

Her films will live on

I subscribe to Netflix, Hulu, HBO Max, Peacock, and Criterion, and I see only one Garbo film available to stream: The Saga of Gosta Berling, on Criterion.

But I can rent 19 others (including Grand Hotel, Queen Christina, Ninotchka, etc.) on Amazon.

On a whim, I looked at the most recent Letterboxd reviews of Ninotchka, and 8 of the last 10 were in Chinese. Apparently it screened today at a film festival in Taiwan as part of a retrospective of screwball comedies.

I'm in discords full of ppl younger than me watching classic Hollywood - including some real crate diggers, like ppl who will watch the Bowery Boys and shit.

Other random gen z classic hollywood heads: when I was on twitter one of my mutuals was a girl otherwise heavily into lgbt issues and astrology, who at one point wanted to create a community for millenial and gen z classic Hollywood fans because she was sick of boomer bigotry; a female youtuber from Sweden whose account was called My Lovely Dead Friends or something like that and was full of Fred Astaire clips; most extreme and not strictly Hollywood but when we did some zoom hangouts for Talking Pictures TV during the pandemic the regulars were mostly older British ppl and then this one teem from Conneticut. He showed off his collection of autographs from British film stars of the 1940's!

There's also a lot of interesting criticism that's v much not old white guy stuff. A tumblr influenced thing is there's a lot of research being done on classic Hollywood "fandom" - fan magazines, letters, etc. - and how it interacts with modern versions.

I dunno, I'm not arguing that it isn't becoming more niche, but ultimately I feel like there's gonna be young ppl watching these films as much as there are still young people reading Balzac.

The most delightful cognitive dissonance was one twitter exchange I stumbled across where a group of zoomers were discussing Henry Fonda being "lowkey suss". I couldn't grasp in what context but was delighted nonetheless.

sounds like they aren't entirely fonda henry

I follow a tumblr that does tournaments of 'hot' vintage actors, there are a lot of tumblr people doing classic tumblr fandom posts about e.g. Errol Flynn and Eartha Kitt and for some reason Claude Rains?

(They class vintage as from the very beginning of cinema to the 1970s, I think - seems fair to me, though absolutely open to debate.)

re: the streaming chat it feels like what's on streaming is less about demand and more about what genius execs think demand should be. not claiming there's a huge demand for old Hollywood but streaming availability is def not a measure of demand.

Side conversation: ideally, I want less internet not more, but what I probably mean is *better* internet. So: do I need to try Discord (and/or dig around on Tumblr)?

re: garbo, i'll have to check out one of those books dan s. i worked with / for an older queer filipino-american man who obviously held garbo in high esteem, and i've been meaning to watch and read more about her since.

My nephew (age 29) is getting into film and catching up on older films but basically can't watch anything from before 1970 because it is too slow. I suggested he watch The Lady Eve when I saw him at the family beach vacation this past week. I am sure he can't wait.

A couple of decades ago i worked with a guy who claimed to be a film buff but when i first knew him he'd basically never seen any b/w movies -- i think The Godfather was the oldest he'd seen. (He later revised this... i remember him saying he'd watched Citizen Kane.)

I've been watching old movies since i was a kid in the 80s and in that time it's never been any more than a niche activity. It's heartening to see so many reviews on Letterboxd of old obscurities... good to know *some* interest in this stuff is being kept alive.

xp haha. i honestly never encountered that problem. if anything, golden age films could be too fast for me! like people talked too fast haha. i mean preston sturges otm. or just about a million other movies. i encountered a little bit of 'i have to watch this differently' with silent films the first time, because it's a little closer to theater. maybe your nephew tried a rivette film lol.

because it is too slow

And yeah i get this. It absolutely takes a different level of concentration to watch, say, pre-60s westerns compared to modern movies.

There are a few objects in my parents' possession that I covet: the baby grand piano, a few lamps, a few rather rare art prints, but otherwise, most of it will be junked. The things that I am most worried about are my dad's files, which go back to 1975 and take up 10 large filing cabinet drawers, as well as all of the ridiculous little tchochkes and godawful landscape paintings by their friends that they have bought over the past two decades.

I also hoard paper, though— I have collections of Philly punk flyers from 1995-2003, Bay Area flyers 2007-2015, the entire run of Punk Planet magazine, hundreds of chapbooks, thousands of books...

I have finally started getting rid of some of the books i know i will never read, don't need to read again, and have no possibility of ever reading. Some of the more valuable stuff I've sold online, the rest of it I have been slowly bringing with me to the farmers market on Saturdays and selling off of a blanket for very cheap.

Luckily most of my record collection is not worth much, though I do have some very valuable tape cassettes.

I also have an enormous VHS collection ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ . Most of it I will probably trash or give away soon, except the porn, which still has some weird value, oddly enough.

I recently gave away all my old homemade cassettes and CDRs to a local record store, couldn't find anyone else who was interested

I mostly trashed my copied cassettes, but hung onto a few. Like Let’s Active’s Big Plans For Everybody is not on Spotify and I don’t have the vinyl.

true, I do still have 100-200 left

Yesterday I was listening to a tape of Suede demos I had dubbed from like Rock Over London or some program my college radio station got cds of. For some reason I listen to cassettes when I put away laundry, as opposed to other formats.

Amoeba won't pay you very much for the recordings you sell back to them (a lot of my stuff comes from Amoeba and Forced Exposure). Maybe I should parcel out my extensive CD/LP collection to you guys before it is too late. I have so so much interesting stuff, recordings from unusual or esoteric artists, and whole labels of stuff, CD and LP box sets, some popular stuff, also many recordings that are not currently available including a whole range of modern classical recordings from Cage, Feldman etc., and I can't stand the idea of it being trashed. I would give it free to ilxors if you want it and would even pay for postage.

I don't want to give it all to one person though. Maybe I could make notices on here periodically (through a new thread) of what I am prepared to give at the time and people can message me their preferences for what they would like. I'm not sure how to make it fair, maybe some kind of rotation.

I can only mail small-to-medium size packets at a time, since I have to walk down the hill to the UPS store. I don't mind spending the money to send things to people here who will like them

that's a lovely idea and generous of you. i for one would love some feldman on cd.

it pains me slightly to see the ilx marketplace go un-updated for years. perhaps it's time we brought it back to life

Side conversation: ideally, I want less internet not more, but what I probably mean is *better* internet. So: do I need to try Discord (and/or dig around on Tumblr)?

― I would prefer not to. (Chinaski), Sunday, August 3, 2025 12:17 PM (seven hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

i had a similar thought, though can't escape the feeling that no amount of curated discord use will ever make me as cool as Daniel_Rf

Please sell unwanted CDs on ILX!!!

that is a lovely idea, Dan S. i would certainly take you up on a package sometime!!

tho also think you could sell stuff here, easily

Side conversation: ideally, I want less internet not more, but what I probably mean is *better* internet. So: do I need to try Discord (and/or dig around on Tumblr)?

― I would prefer not to. (Chinaski), Sunday, August 3, 2025 12:17 PM (seven hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

me: could we feed the entire internet to one of these maybe
https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1mdknva/super_powerful_industrial_shredder_devours_just/

I made a thread
It Will Have Sparked Joy: physical media iso new home

Side conversation: ideally, I want less internet not more, but what I probably mean is *better* internet. So: do I need to try Discord (and/or dig around on Tumblr)?

― I would prefer not to. (Chinaski), Sunday, August 3, 2025 12:17 PM (seven hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Hmmm, I'd say only if you're willing to spend a lot of time looking. I'm signed up for dozens (a lot automatically because they're for patreons I support), but only really check 2-3 with any regularity. If a discord is popular I find it impossible to keep up; if it's only like five people that is of course its own problem. And beyond that it's always a gamble whether the community you've chosen will be your vibe, a shared interest doesn't exactly guarantee that.

As a medium it's basically designed like a chat room, and those always gave me anxiety back in the day, so I can't say I'm a huge fan. But it is at least self selecting and moderated, which means I'll take it over social media any day.

Thanks Daniel. Leaning towards no based on that description. Sounds like it would have been great when I was bored in my old office job, but needlessly anxiety-inducing right now.