Shifting Sands

My VHS collection continues to grow. Over the past eight days, I acquired perhaps fourteen tapes, and these came just as I was beginning to again gain some ground on the intractable backlog. Every passel of tapes necessitates an adjustment of the ones I already have so that they may all be stored in something like an efficient and graceful fashion. It gets harder all the time, and it may soon become impossible.

I had recently had my tapes arranged in a pleasing fashion visually, but it was inefficient. Many tapes (and most of my DVDs) were inaccessible without moving several other tapes, and still all the tapes couldn't fit in that space. Worse, they weren't and couldn't be alphabetized, so even the tapes on top couldn't be had immediately, since I had to scan most of them before spotting the desired one. It was an imperfect system.

Having bought more tapes and made a number of recent changes to my spreadsheet (which now lists the director of each film, shows how many tapes are yet to be watched and offers a link to the trailer of most films), I decided that now could be the time to finally alphabetize the physical tapes. To ease that process, I took have of them and stacked them like bricks where they had been before. I took the other half and arranged them in some cardboard boxes that fit under the coffee table.

This remains a troubled system. I dream of bookcases that reach to the ceiling and accomodate all my tapes in a linear fashion, but this will do for now. Everything being easily accessed is a nice condition to reach again, and I will likely make more frequent use of movies that had been somewhat forgotten on account of being out of sight. I will be OK like this while working towards the next reform to my system.