Helter Skelter in the Summer Swelter

Our Director Writes:

Diary of a Mature Student: So here we are and here we are and here we go...

You see what happens, Larry? You see what happens when you mention a movie? This is what happens, Larry. Okay?

The summer period is a weird time to be a mature student. Not that there's a good time to be a mature student, unless you like everyone looking at you like you're crazy, but hey, that's par for the course. But being unable to find work and having a lot of time on your hands means, well, that you notice a lot more things than you otherwise normally might.

Let's take a step back away from the mature student thing for a moment.

Diary of a Mature Person -

Wait. That doesn't work either, for obvious reasons.

Diary of a Pre-digital generation remnant, summertime.

Here's the thing. I envy the current generation because they don't have to carry around so much shit.

I'm happy to admit that I'm a pop culture whore commentator. Less so these last few years due to a general slowing down and growing up, but between, say, '96 and '06 I followed music, films and books with a passion, which meant, for the most part, buying the fucking things. It's not the buying I resent - so don't get me started on torrenters, we'll be here all day - it's more that now, slowly approaching my third decade, I have boxes and boxes and boxes and even more boxes of irrelevant shit.

Don't get me wrong - not only was it very relevant to me at the time, but I still like to go through what can wistfully be called a library (in that I have more CDs than my current university library and more books than the English section). I like owning or having owned some of this stuff.

The stuff I don't like owning or having owned mas made its' way, therefore, to a series of charity shops, or to the dump, or has been sold via Amazon or, occasionally, eBay, an experience that taught me never to offer international postage again.

Something like ten dustbin bags' worth went to charity shops, although that includes clothes, so there may be some unlucky bastards wandering round in some of my fashion faux-pas-s from the last ten years or so. Another ten bags worth went to the dump to be recycled into something more useful, like tennis shoes or compost. Oh, and I have reserved a special place for the unique kind of torment that is CEX.

Let's talk about CEX for a moment. I've sold them hundreds of pounds worth of CDs and DVDs over the last month or so, and they'll go on to offer them for, on average, four times what they pay for them. This isn't such a bad ratio; value has a curious differential when it comes to entertainment property, because as soon as you buy a DVD the value decreases, followed by a further decrease if you watch the goddamn thing, and an even sharper decrease if it's a popular dvd, because everyone wants to sell theirs too. It is not, as they say, a sellers' market.

But on the five or so occasions I've done this, it's never been exactly what you might call a perfect experience. Sure, I've sold 90% of what I've taken in, the rest being just to weird, American or otherwise ineligible for their mystical buyer-seller bond to take. But their staff appears to be made up entirely of disinterested teenagers - which I know automatically makes me sound old, but, alas, it's true - and for an exchange company, they don't actually seem that happy to be buying goods even considering they only need to sell a quarter of what they buy to even out their profit margin.

This is turning into a bit of a rant. I like CEX, and I like it even more that I've probably done all of the selling I'm going to do to them which means, functionally, that I won't have to deal with them again for a l-o-n-g time.

At the same time, my town always had another exchange shop for games. No, they weren't perfect - their range of titles relied entirely upon a dedicated but elusive band of people willing to sell on the latest games or on being able to buy the games on import and sell them on for a profit - but they were 'local', 'independent', and all these other nice little buzzwords people use when they didn't want to give money to the local Faceless Multi-store Corporate Conglomerate (tm).

That shop closed down a fortnight ago. Their lease was approaching, and with a remarkable prescience they decided that everything's moving towards digital downloads anyway so what's the point in keeping a bricks-and-mortar shop to sell physical units when fairly soon they might be obsolete?

A month and a half ago, my local bookshop closed down as well. They were 'independent' etcetera etcetera, but they also had a place in my heart because I worked there as a Saturday Assistant for a year. Granted, when I started it was pre-minimum wage, which meant that at £2.65 an hour I had to work for two and a half hours just to buy a book. But it was a good place - a nice place, although that's a wallpaper word - to be. They're gone now, although thanks to the manager giving me an 'ex-staff-member' discount on top of the 50% closing-down sale I now have journals for the next two academic years, which will remind me of the place whenever I make notes.

However, Yes, I think I had a Point somewhere when I started all this.

So even after an exhaustive purge of CDs, books, and DVDs, I still have box upon box of them in storage. The next project, in theory, is to digitize my entire cd collection, which may take the better part of a year and require a lot of data storage, and also may require the ability on my part to care about most of the music in the collection, which may be in short supply.

But if I were, say, an 18-or-19 year old now, I could in theory get all the music and movies I needed without ever having to own something I could physically hold in my hands. Sure, for mainstream culture iTunes takes care of music and movies. Even Kindle etc are now moving in on books, meaning you will be able to carry them around in one place rather than in hundreds of bound pulped-wood dead-tree copies.

And, contrary to what the majority of the generation before me thinks - and that the generation after will probably not have to think about much, if at all - this is a good thing. I would love to have every single one of my books in one place, alphabetized, ready at the touch of a touchscreen, or my entire music collection on one drive somewhere, or any movie I wanted without having to put disc to drive. And it will happen, in the next ten years or so.

As a film student, I like the idea of being able to carry around my body of work in one place rather than having to whip out DVDs to show people. Hell, if I could afford an iPad, I'd be able to bore no end of people with my work, showing them my films on a decent sized screen. One day, I suspect, I will. Look forward to that day, huh?

For now, however, I'm content to try an experiment. Confession time; I've never bought anything particularly substantial digitally before. An episode of Ashes to Ashes and two or three songs on iTunes notwithstanding, I've only really dipped my toe in the waters of Legal Digital Downloading.

So now it's time to take the plunge. (Although it's not exactly plunge-y, but hey.) It's time to purchase an album digitally.

Yeah baby.

So here's the deal.

Dog Soldiers is a good film, bordering on a great film. And before you ask, yes, it does feel a little odd doing the Amazon Associates linking thing, but since nobody reads this, and nobody's going to link through, I don't feel so bad.

Back In The Day, the Dog Soldiers soundtrack was oddly rare on CD. In fact, to buy it in America (Dog Soldiers) will set you back $75 - $120 dollars, which seems a bit punitive. If memory serves, pre-download, the CD would have set you back £32-£64 over here, which is, again, somewhat punitive.

Now, it'll cost you £7.49 to download. So I'm going to try it out. Cross your fingers, for I am old, and these concepts are new.

In fact, as a student, it curiously only costs me £7.12. Which is nice.

... And it appears to be as simple as that.

Suddenly, I'm impressed. And it only cost £7.12 to impress me.

Does that make me cheap?