well, i am buying like a madman so remorse seems to be a distant memory in my head...

I know several others have had issues with impulse or OCD collecting amassing 5000 or more in a collection. I certainly went through a period of quantity over quality. I bought everything and was renting and ripping a dozen titles a week. Fortunately for me it was relatively short lived. I think it was the switch to Blu-ray which made me see how much crap was sitting there never to be seen.

I've mentioned before, people collect stamps, coins, cars, baseball cards, etc. All sorts of shit. I think the one difference is that most of those collections will appreciate, or at least hold their value if purchased smartly. DVD's and BR's drop like a rock. Sorry but the whack-a-doodles who need this or that slip cover or who buy multiple versions of releases so they have every version of the cover just don't make sense to me. It's your money so I salute you for your attempt at keeping the economy going, however why buy 5 versions of Transformers? At least get 5 different movies.

There is also what an item does. Books, movies are designed to be used while something like art does it's job by just being seen. Most people don't really collect for value, it's cool when a comic jumps up because that means it could be sold and get the collection and have a bunch left over.

Another thing I do is keep a somewhat "rigid" list of tv show season sets I want to purchase (once they hit certain price points), and adhere to it closely. (This takes a lot of prior "research" on sites like tvshowsondvd and amazon, to create such a rigid list).

This greatly reduces a lot of impulse buying when it comes to tv show season sets. (Especially considering tv shows are a huge time commitment to watch through).


(I find this doesn't really work when it comes to $2 dump bin blurays). But when it comes to $5+ blurays, it's somewhat mixed in its effectiveness for me.

I completely agree that in most cases, especially buying new releases, that disc collecting is a money-loser.

But if you know the market you can find ways to make it "profitable".

For instance If I go into a pawn shop I'll find 10 DVDs for $20. Usually I can find at least one DVD that's worth $20 or so on eBay. When you sell it on eBay it basically pays for the other 9 titles you bought making them "free" in a sense.

If I was younger, this is something I could be into. These days I don't have the time and patience for stuff like this anymore. (Nor the interest).

Maybe I'm just getting old and tired, but as I got older I found that I value my personal solitary free time a lot more, than when I was younger wasting it on shopping around town and/or reselling stuff I find at thrift shops, garage sales, etc .... I did the buying/reselling thing briefly when I was younger, before ebay was around.


(This is what makes online stores a godsend for me. No need to drive around town anymore on my days off).

I thought about sell my stuff on eBay piece by piece and actually making some cash, but I just figured it wouldn't be worth the effort, unless it was some valuable which I wouldn't be selling anyway. I just went to selldvdsonline.com and took what they'd give me, which wasn't much, and was glad I cleared up the space. That way, I could waste money buying it AGAIN on Blu-Ray, or in the case of CDs, stupidly expensive boxed sets . On that subject, what is the difference between the two versions of the pop Dylan complete album collection, and when does the second volume come out?

Thanks for the selldvdsonline recommendation. They do pay shit but in combination with second spin - looks like I can close the thread on this forum and just sell my crap to them for a nice bit of scratch. For a while secondspin was paying shit but glad they are back to paying better for used BD's.

I looked into SecondSpin, but they only refund a maximum of $5.26 in shipping charges per order (and only if they accepted your trade-ins). Granted, most people probably sell in much smaller batches compared to what I was looking to unload -- but I was wary of shelling out all that money on shipping fees just to have half the items rejected. Never heard of SellDVDsOnline before, but it's nice they at least provide a pre-paid shipping label. I'm curious how it works out for you guys, as they don't mention if they return rejected items or not. That's another fear of mine when selling online, which is why I usually just avoid it unless the item can bring in more than $5.

I sold off nearly a thousand titles a few months back (about 90 of them blu-ray) and only averaged about a dollar each from Amazon trade-in, tax deductable donations and selling at a local used record store. Counting multi-DVD sets, that was was less than $0.50 per disc -- or about a fourth of what I originally paid for everything. I'm sure I could have gotten more selling on eBay/Amazon Marketplace, but the thought of creating all those listings/printing postage/making multiple trips to the post office didn't seem worth the effort... even if it could have doubled the money.

I sell all mine slowly but surely on Half.com. Takes some time but I usually get the best price that someone will actually pay for a used DVD, BD, or CD.

Yeah, with second spin it's best to sell them in batches. Box 1 Box 2, etc.

These days I don't even bother anymore with selling old books, cds, dvds/blurays, etc ...

I mostly give old dvds/blurays away to local friends/family, and/or trade stuff with them. For the really horrible dvds they don't even want, I eventually drop them off at a local Goodwill or Salvation Army outlet.

The only times I bother selling my old stuff now, is if it brings in over ten thousand $$$$, such as a house, land, etc ...

I don't even bother selling old cars anymore. I just drive them until they're almost dead, and eventually tow it away to the garbage dump. Pointless trying to sell a barely functional non-antique 10+ year old car.

Hypothetically IF I had never purchased a bluray player/drive, I would definitely have over 5000 dvds in my collection by now.

What led me to purchasing a bluray player back in late-2011, turned out to be something really stupid. Here's a post I made on another message board about it.

http://www.hometheaterforum.com/topi...2#entry4108706


********

(Going on a huge tangent and long rant).

For many years prior and over the entire 2011 (up until December), I was very much one of those hardcore (but silent) "anti-bluray" types. I kept on saying to myself over and over again that I would never buy any blurays, and had a long list of personal rationalizations like:

- It uses 128-bit AES encryption.
- It's more expensive than dvd.
- Dvd upscaling is "good enough".
- It will hogg up too much hard drive space.
- There's no xxx-rated porno movies on bluray.
- etc ...

Basically I was (privately) finding and coming up with every possible rationalization and excuse to not buy into bluray. (I was also highly resisting the notion of $5 blurays too).


In hindsight, what actually turned the tide and completely changed my opinion overnight on bluray, was something that was really stupid and "borderline bottom feeding". (A total overnight 180).

Sometime during the middle of December 2011, by chance I came across the "Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus" bluray for $2 at a nearby discount store dump bin. I don't remember seeing this movie before (unless I was watching it really drunk and subsequently blacked out), but I always wanted to see it. I was about to buy the dvd version of "Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus", until I noticed the dvd version was $6 and from the exact same dump bin where I found the $2 bluray version!

This was when I knew I had to buy a bluray player. It made no sense anymore (in my mind) to constantly resist bluray.

********



In hindsight, I suppose I could be grateful for this random fluke encounter (or happenstance) which oddly enough significantly reduced my ocd impulse buying/hoarding.

In Houston, we have stores called Movie Exchange. (http://www.movieexchange-houston.com/) Not sure if it's a national chain. I took 20 DVDs that were selling for 75 cents each on half.com and I got $17 for all 20. I was actually very happy to get $17.

Back in the late-1990's, what really cut short any potential ocd compulsive dvd collecting hobby for me, was due to one of my first dvd purchases being a defective disk. My first copy of Terminator 2 froze around 20 minutes into the movie.

Due to this "unfortunate" mishap, basically any "dvd hobby" was over for me at the time, before it hardly ever began. (ie. Almost like a "stillborn" death). In hindsight this may have been a "blessing in disguise", in that my compulsive collecting/hoarding of dvds was abruptly "short circuited" at the time.

So in effect, I very much avoided buying many dvds during the entire 2000's decade. My ocd compulsive mentality at the time "dictated" that I had to watch through every dvd disc I purchased, in order to check whether there were any disc manufacturing defects. (But I didn't always do this). This particular aspect of my ocd mentality, basically limited my dvd purchases to around two dozen or so dvds over the entire 2000's decade. (Mostly stuff like Star Wars, Star Trek, Cheech and Chong, Beavis and Butthead, etc ...).

I should really try Half.com again. It's just so hard since you are competing with dozens of other listings with no pictures so it's a wild grab bag for a buyer.

We did half.com for years for DVDs, CDs, books, etc. We stopped because it was so much time packing everything up and they opened a Half Price Books near us. You can just dump your stuff there for a few bucks. You don't get as much, but we'll still do anything we know is valuable on eBay.

My thoughts lately is that my time is worth at least $40 an hour, so unless I know I have a true gem worth more than that, I won't put any effort into selling it. I'll trade or sell it cheap here, or just give it to family or GoodWill for a tax write off.

(Long rant).

What held my ocd compulsive impulse buying in check for the entire 2000's decade, was another aspect of my ocd mentality which "dictated" that I had to watch through every dvd disc I purchased, in order to check whether there were any disc manufacturing defects. The only way I was able to get around this mentality, was when I first discovered dvd ripping in 2011. (I was very late to the game).

Back in early-2011, I picked up several tv show season sets for $10 or $15 a pop at some after-xmas sales. (All the seasons of the show Numb3rs, except for the final season. It was largely an impulse buy on my part, coming from an engineering/science background which sparked my initial interest). After several days of binge watching, I came to the realization it was taking a very long time to finish watching through these tv season sets.

At the time, I was trying to find a way to get around my ocd "paranoia" (and anxiety) over dvd disc manufacturing defects, before the store return/exchange time period was expired for these dvd season sets. After doing some reading on the technical aspects of dvd, I figured that a particular dvd disc should be fine if the computer can read every single sector without any problems on that particular disc.

In hindsight (and unknowingly at the time to me), this is what led me onto my ocd compulsive collecting/hoarding and impulse buying binges of dvds, when I knew that dvd discs would be fine if the isos can be extracted in their entirety without any problems on the computer. Subsequently, I went on a binge and picked up the season sets of shows like: The Closer, The Shield, the revived Outer Limits, etc ... where I checked all the discs on the computer, and they all turned out to be fine.

(Further rant).

In the case of bluray, a similar thing happened to me but on a shorter time scale.

Initially I only purchased a standalone bluray player in late-2011. So at the time, I was only buying blurays that I wanted to watch through entirely. (ie. Schwarzenegger, Stallone, James Bond, etc ... movies which were already in the $5 bargain bins, and Star Wars, Blade Runner, Avatar, etc ...). Almost no "impulse buying" of blurays at the time.

Around 6-7 months later in mid-2012, I picked up a computer bd-r drive. As with dvd, it was easy to check for bluray disc manufacturing defects on the computer by extracting the undecrypted isos in their entirety. This pretty much eliminated my ocd paranoia/anxiety over bluray disc manufacturing defects, and started my ocd collecting/hoarding bluray habit.

My ocd collecting/hoarding was further compounded in 2013, when local discount/dollar stores were starting to have bulging $2 bluray dump bins.

(Another offtopic ocd rant).

From my past ocd experiences, the only way I've been able to "jump off" a particular collecting/hoarding "treadmill", was to find a new "treadmill" to jump onto. For example, once I was on the compulsive bluray collecting/hoarding treadmill, I largely didn't care anymore about my previous treadmills like: dvds, comic books, music cds, vinyl records, etc ...

Though in the past, most of these new treadmills I largely came across by semi-random chance (ie. happenstance). None of it was planned at all.

Today I now know better than to work directly against my ocd mentality. (It would be similar to a hardcore alcoholic attempting to "stop drinking" by sheer willpower, which rarely ever works in practice). Knowing this, I've been looking at possibly "reverse engineering" my ocd by lightly steering it to another different "treadmill" to latch onto (instead of letting it happen by semi-random chance).


One possible new treadmill I've been looking at recently, is to figure out the ultra nerdy/geeky subject of "string theory" in depth. (The Sheldon Cooper character from the CBS sitcom "The Big Bang Theory" was a string theorist). I started going through a string theory textbook I purchased recently.

Only time will tell whether I can successfully jump off the ocd compulsive bluray collecting/hoarding "treadmill", by steering my ocd obsession onto a new treadmill (like string theory or something else).

You will have to collect all 26 dimensions for String Theory.

The quantum operators form the Virasoro algebra, where the generators obey [Lm,Ln]=(m−n)Lm+n+c12m(m2−1)δm+n,0. Here "c" is the central charge, which is the space-time dimension we are working over. We need this algebra to interact appropriately with the physical states of the system (i.e. Lm|ϕ⟩ information), and only when c=26 do we guarantee that there are no negative-norm states in the complete physical system.

I hear the first 11 dimensions can be had cheaply at Walmart.

Back in the 1980's and early-1990's, the ones of interest were the 10 dimensional superstring theories, and all the zillions of possible calabiyau compacitification manifolds.

By the mid-1990's, string theorists were looking at other stuff like p-branes and string+brane configurations.


I've been wondering why exactly Sheldon Cooper decided to give up on string theory recently. Besides the general vague explanations of:

- lack of progress over 20 years
- looking like a fool
- wasting his life
- etc ....



http://bigbangtheory.wikia.com/wiki/...hip_Diremption

So far it's somewhat heavy going in going through some string theory textbooks and lecture notes pdf files I found online. My math background is somewhat rusty, after 25+ years of not using much of it.

I was an engineering major in college, and I was briefly in a physics graduate program. I left the physics graduate program after failing the prelim/comp exams two times, and having barely passable grades in the graduate level physics courses. (ie. I hardly handed in any assignments, and didn't do so well on the exams).

(As an illustrative example).

Just before I jumped onto the ocd compulsive dvd collecting/hoarding treadmill in early-2011, my previous ocd treadmill was a brief 8-9 month obsession with several particular comic book titles.

In particular, I was making monthly preorders for the then-upcoming issues of IDW's Dungeons and Dragons comic book back in mid-2010. My ocd was manifesting in the form of obsessively googling every day for the next month's preorder comic solicitations and previews of upcoming issues. Towards the end of this 8-9 month time period, I was also picking up graphic novels of other then-recent comic books series like: the Wildstorm/DC version of World of Warcraft, Skull Kickers, Nemesis, etc ... some via preorder. (Not so much hoarding).

(During this same time period, I was also picking up a lot of video game strategy guides from thrift shops for around $2 a pop. Ironically, I wasn't even playing any of these video games).


By early-2011, I was slowly starting to jump ship and onto the ocd compulsive dvd collecting/hoarding treadmill. (Never anticipating at the time, that this would be my next ocd compulsion treadmill).

Since jumping ship onto the ocd collecting/hoarding dvd treadmill, subsequent further issues and graphic novels were published of the above mentioned comic titles, over 2011 to the present day. Today I find that I have no interest in picking up the post-2010/2011 graphic novels of the World of Warcraft, IDW's Dungeons & Dragons, Skull Kickers, etc ... (ie. No ocd compulsive completionist impulse to "complete" my graphic novel collection).

(Similar stories for when I jumped off of other treadmills, such as music cds, vinyl records, etc ...).