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    #51
    I can't remember the term for it but there was a book recently trying to position the Swedish approach to downsizing in anticipation of moving into sheltered housing/dying as the new hygge. Sending all the cosy socks and marshmallow forks to Oxfam didn't seem to resonate with the public as much as the parent trend.

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      #52
      Originally posted by Hot Pepsi View Post
      It only takes one afternoon cleaning out the garage or basement of an elderly or deceased relative to teach one that harsh lesson.
      Testify! It took us three months to 'deal' with mom and dad's house contents, and they lived in a small place and were not hoarders in any way.

      But L's parents....ugh: a) her mom is a gatherer/hoarder/accumulator and b) their shit is valuable. Like, antiques and 'good' furniture and shit. Not the sort of things that go quickly for $20 on Kijiji/Craigslist.

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        #53
        Originally posted by Pietro Paolo Virdis View Post
        The equivalent to coming home from work and watching your house burn down to the ground, with all your family albums inside.
        I can imagine this might seem odd, but am I really the only person to quite fancy this? What a blessed relief and what a blessed release.

        Assuming no-one hurt, obvs.

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          #54
          I feel the same.

          The only irreplaceable stuff I really care about in this house is all the art my grandma did. My dog doesn’t count as mere “stuff,” of course. I have a number of antiques, a bit of sports memorabilia, and books that couldn’t be replaced but if I got a decent insurance check for it, I wouldn’t be too sad about that.

          When I lived in a string of tan carpet apartments and even when I first moved here, I felt the urge to make my space “my own” by filling it with stuff that reminded me of positive memories. But I don’t feel the need to do that as much now and all my walls are full anyway.

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            #55
            Poet WS Graham's approach to moving house.

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              #56
              My good friend Debi is legendary for great stories. She and her husband own 1/2 of an old Toronto semi-detached house. Good friends of theirs made a standing offer to the elderly Polish man who owned the other half. When he finally decided to sell, they agreed on a number, shook hands, and that was that.

              On the day of hand-over, he had breakfast, got dressed and walked out the front door, leaving absolutely everything behind. About an hour later, he knocked on the door, walked upstairs, grabbed his toothbrush, walked back out and they never saw him again.

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                #57
                Aren't you in Canada WOM? Didn't HMV stand for Hot Music Values there?

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                  #58
                  Originally posted by Hot Pepsi View Post
                  As you can see, I’m very troubled by the problem of “stuff.”
                  And also upset at the demise of shops. Which only exist to sell "stuff".

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                    #59
                    Originally posted by diggedy derek View Post
                    Aren't you in Canada WOM? Didn't HMV stand for Hot Music Values there?
                    Everyone used to think it meant 'Her Majesty's Video' or some such, cuz it was British. I wish I were kidding.

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                      #60
                      Originally posted by Patrick Thistle View Post
                      And also upset at the demise of shops. Which only exist to sell "stuff".
                      I’m not upset about it. I just think it will be a difficult transition for society as a whole, not just people in the retail industry.

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                        #61
                        The other day I bought a boxed set of the first 11 Leonard Cohen albums for €24. The sound re-production is excellent. In what vaguely sane world would you not rather own this than have them stored almost invisibly somewhere on your hard drive?

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                          #62
                          To put some context on the state of (non mainstream) CD retailing in the UK, a particular week in September 2017 contained a lot of new releases by "our sort" of artists - yer 6 Music / Uncut magazine types.

                          These are the estimated first week sales from (UK chart forum) Buzzjack and given the way most albums plummet out of the chart from the second week onwards you can expect them to be the lion's share of their total sales:

                          The National - 20,000
                          Nothing But Thieves - 10,000
                          Neil Young - 7,000
                          Sparks - 5,000
                          The Waterboys - 4,000
                          Tori Amos - 3,000
                          Alvvays - 2,000
                          Nick Mulvey - 2,000

                          Given these include Amazon etc, and paid-for downloads, we can assume that in most branches of HMV it will have been touch and go whether they sold a single copy of that Alvvays album (which I own and I'm not knocking).

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                            #63
                            Originally posted by Pietro Paolo Virdis View Post
                            Do yourself a favor and export it all

                            Export the lists today
                            Thanks, PPV. I'm going to try that.

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                              #64
                              Originally posted by Hot Pepsi View Post
                              I’m not upset about it. I just think it will be a difficult transition for society as a whole, not just people in the retail industry.
                              Some people in society will find it difficult. A lot have already made the transition.

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                                #65
                                The problem with the "oh, just download it" argument remains the same - the amount of stuff available for streaming or downloading, whether in music or TV/film is still only a fraction of what's available on physical formats. Streaming's fine if you're after popular, up-to-date stuff, or popular classics. Anything even just slightly obscure and over 5 years old? Nope.

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                                  #66
                                  Pretty much everything I listen to is over 5 years old, and on Spotify.

                                  I'm not doing very well at reading comprehension today, mind.

                                  But I'd have Bellatrix as at least "just slightly obscure".

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                                    #67
                                    Originally posted by blameless View Post
                                    The problem with the "oh, just download it" argument remains the same - the amount of stuff available for streaming or downloading, whether in music or TV/film is still only a fraction of what's available on physical formats. Streaming's fine if you're after popular, up-to-date stuff, or popular classics. Anything even just slightly obscure and over 5 years old? Nope.
                                    I was quite impressed to get The Planets’ Goonhilly Down off Spotify the other day. Based on how hard it was to track down on CD that’s not bad.

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                                      #68
                                      Originally posted by blameless View Post
                                      The problem with the "oh, just download it" argument remains the same - the amount of stuff available for streaming or downloading, whether in music or TV/film is still only a fraction of what's available on physical formats. Streaming's fine if you're after popular, up-to-date stuff, or popular classics. Anything even just slightly obscure and over 5 years old? Nope.
                                      That hasn't been my experience. Pretty much everything that I've ever looked for is on Spotify.
                                      Now, Netflix, on the other hand...

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                                        #69
                                        Originally posted by Patrick Thistle View Post
                                        Some people in society will find it difficult. A lot have already made the transition.
                                        Really? A lot of people already live in a world where shops have entirely disappeared?

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                                          #70
                                          Just to mix things up a little bit, I went into HMV on Saturday for the first time in ages and bought what I believe used to be called an LP for my 15-year-old daughter who is loving playing vinyl records on the cheapo record player that she got for Christmas. Not everyone, even teenagers, thinks that the present or future should be 100% digital.

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                                            #71
                                            Originally posted by blameless View Post
                                            The problem with the "oh, just download it" argument remains the same - the amount of stuff available for streaming or downloading, whether in music or TV/film is still only a fraction of what's available on physical formats. Streaming's fine if you're after popular, up-to-date stuff, or popular classics. Anything even just slightly obscure and over 5 years old? Nope.

                                            This is just false. Most of the stuff I listen to is older than 20 years old, much of it is obscure, and I only have two or three CDs out of a few hundred that are not also on Spotify or another easily accessible platform.

                                            A few years back, Spotify published the fact that about 4 million songs on their service have never been played once. Is that obscure enough for you?And something like 90% of the traffic comes from 10% of the content, but they leave the rest of it on there. Memory no longer seems to be finite.

                                            In most cases, if it’s too obscure to be in an online format, it’s probably too obscure to still be available on CD either. Because it probably means that the band self-produced it and didn’t make many copies or their label disappeared sometime before 2005ish or all the copies are stuck in a warehouse somewhere. There’s just no reason why anyone who wants other people to hear a recording would not put that recording online. At least for sale on iTunes or on their own site. Forcing people to pay for postage and what not to ship a CD is just an unnecessary barrier.

                                            There are a few CDs by very local bands from the pre MySpace era that I haven’t been able to find anywhere and their music is not online either. Just lost. Like tears in the rain.

                                            I’d like to always have a CD drive on my computer so I can download those few things that are on CD but not already available online. But the “fraction” of music online is a very, very large fraction. I suspect it’s well north of 50% now and growing.

                                            There’s also some non-obscure stuff that’s not there because the artists have a deal with a different service or, in Prince’s case, don’t seem to care. But there aren’t many of these. Not enough to keep physical retail music stores in business.

                                            http://time.com/4274430/spotify-albums/



                                            Films are not always so readily available. I’ve run into a few titles that Amazon shows as only available on DVD. Monty Python and the Holy Grail, for example. Some kind of dispute over royalties. So I still have a BluRay player for this reason. And there are some films that just don’t seem to be available in any format.

                                            But that list appears to be shrinking. Even fairly obscure stuff can be had somewhere online for a price. On YouTube if nowhere else.
                                            Last edited by Hot Pepsi; 31-12-2018, 03:50.

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                                              #72
                                              Originally posted by imp View Post
                                              The other day I bought a boxed set of the first 11 Leonard Cohen albums for €24. The sound re-production is excellent. In what vaguely sane world would you not rather own this than have them stored almost invisibly somewhere on your hard drive?
                                              That’s an excellent deal, but I pay $12 a month for Spotify and don’t have to store any of it anywhere and nobody will have to decide what to do with it when I’m dead.

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                                                #73
                                                But maybe some of us would quite like to inherit a few personal items which belonged to our parents or other relatives. I don't have much which belonged to my parents, none of it is valuablel in a monetary sense, but pretty much all of it has sentimental significance.

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                                                  #74
                                                  Originally posted by Hot Pepsi View Post
                                                  That’s an excellent deal, but I pay $12 a month for Spotify and don’t have to store any of it anywhere and nobody will have to decide what to do with it when I’m dead.
                                                  I'm honestly not worried about what happens to my Leonard Cohen boxed set when I'm dead. My daughters might think, "Oh, wonder what the old fart was into? Maybe I'll give it a spin." Or they put it out for the charity shop and some other old fart says, "Bloody hell, a Leonard Cohen boxed set for a Euro! I'll have that."

                                                  The same goes for my entire CD and vinyl collection. I constantly try to downsize my material life, including books and a few CDs, but I don't care how many of both that I own. That's not materialism, that's cultural treasure, and when the coming energy crisis means you can lonely go online two hours a day, I'll have something else to look at and listen to.

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                                                    #75
                                                    I think that decluttering makes a whole lot of sense when dealing with multiple instances of things like kitchen utensils. Just how many forks and knives do you really need? How many plates or cups? It's not as if every house doubles up as a restaurant or as if we are constantly giving dinner parties every night. In Sudan, I got by on a couple of saucepans, three or so forks and knives and spoons. (Guests could always bring their own.). Foreigners among us shared around our books, lent each other cassettes and so on. I owned no more clothes than I could pack into one admittedly heavy rucksack. It was actually very liberating and taught me a lot about what is really necessary to live an enjoyable life. Back then, of course, there was no internet to muddy the waters,

                                                    So I do understand a lot of what Hot Pepsi is saying. At the same time, as imp writes, I don't really care now about having a few more physical objects around me now. I live in a different environment and have more space. As I wrote upthread, they are part of my life and while I'm alive I would like to continue enjoying them.

                                                    Also, this thing about clearing up your deceased relatives' belongings: I do appreciate that for many people it can be at best a tendious undergoing and at worst a traumatic one; but is this always the case? I knew my mother was going to die for some weeks before the actual day and when she did so sorting out her stuff actually brought back a good few happy memories and some small surprises, nice ones, as well.

                                                    All this said, I do wonder why we have more than 20 forks in our drawer.
                                                    Last edited by Sporting; 31-12-2018, 07:11.

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