There's no way to contextualize how ready Gabriel was to pawn something. That was just his bank, kinda. Anytime E3 rolled around he started foraging for anything made of silver colored plastic. He would have sold me if he could! I would have sold me too, I guess. Rented, at least. But panel three of this strip is a documentary.
Versions of this Media Ownership Reclamation are happening at both our houses, although Ronia is more likely to purchase three DVDs for five dollars at an antique store - Antique Stores sell DVDs now, feel free to wither - and watch them on an older console. I think taking pictures with real cameras is of a piece, frankly. She is less likely to do as Gabriel The Younger did and marshal elemental forces to stand up some kind of family server.
Plex, the Jellyfin I'd never heard of, it's not even that crazy - it's literally just rolling back to shit like the XBMC, which they now call Kodi for reasons I guess I can understand. It's not much before they were born, but it would never have been situated in their memory. Netflix and Spotify would occupy that space - not merely as services, but as default concepts for how media is consumed.
They're engineered to seek novelty, but it's at least a little funny that the hunt for same has caused them to dust off a disheveled, twenty-year old norm. Owning things - the classic model known as "buy to have" - must feel like a revolutionary act by comparison. VHS tapes were prohibitively expensive initially; they were for rental stores to buy and you to borrow. The little window where people have been obtaining movies isn't even really that long. And certainly, you still can. This whole thing is mostly about folkways, which corporations can construct and suspend o'erhead, until they fall on you like the big red mouse trap in the game "Mouse Trap." If people are seeing through it, and they are, it's because these gremlins have been so aggressive in their campaign to extract ever greater wealth from these traps - commercials on a service you pay for, just as an example - it's put the whole thing into relief. They've made conveniences inconvenient. It's rude, at best!
I wouldn't switch to Windows 11 unless there was a gun to my head, and that's such a weird way to get someone to install an OS that I think I would always question my decision. It's not literally what they're doing, but there's certainly a kind of Chekhov situation; with all the horseshit I hear about weekly on the new platform it's not something I'm interested in putting on a machine which is the same place I work and hang out with friends. After awhile, you just get tired of being fucked with.
(CW)TB out.
