I'm happy to say that I still engage in direct and active listening sessions for albums I am particularly excited about hearing for the first time. I've read repeatedly that listeners rarely sit and devote their full attention to a record anymore. For these special albums, I preload the official bit-perfect FLAC to a portable device, don a pair of circumaurals with a sound signature best-suited to the musical style I'll be enjoying, cover myself in blankets in bed, black out the room, close my eyes, and take in the album in what is effectively an environment of sensory isolation.

It's out of respect to the artist and to achieve optimal experiential enjoyment.

My next step is to incorporate an AudioQuest Dragonfly Red to overcome the shoddy performance of an android phone's internal DAC.

You should do drugs.

This is exactly my problem, even though I mainly only hoard digital media these days. (But if it weren't for my constant relocating and lack of funds + space, I'd absolutely be living in a literal fortress of my hoarded treasures. Eventually I'd die and no one would be able to find me, and my numerous cats and exotic pets would eat me.)

With me, it tends to happen in cyclic phases..? I'll compulsively hoard, say, soviet-era cartoons for a few months with a feverish intensity, and then abruptly lose interest in it entirely and delete it, and then do it again a mere few weeks later. I've always wondered if anything in particular can trigger or intensify the hoarding behavior. (I for one notice that I do it more if I feel trapped in a certain situation or relationship or whatever-- almost as a way to disassociate and remove myself?) I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing ever, though I often wonder whenever I leap from bed at 4 am stricken with the all-consuming urge to download EVERY single 1990s cult training video (or every ebook on Appalachian folklore) in existence.

Or I'll hoard things while insisting to myself that it's "For future book research!"-- hundreds or thousands of old news articles, field recordings, dozens and dozens of themed playlists, obscure 1950s music, and unnerving old training videos, and, sure enough... I will abandon it, it'll fall into disarray and a few months later I will use that to justify beginning the hoarding process anew rather than actually using what I already have.

I always secretly love when my laptop or computer dies, because then I have an excuse to hoard everything all over again and make lots of tidy (but needlessly elaborate) "To Acquire" lists. Which is the phase I am in now, since I'm on a new computer. Tabbed word processing programs (mine also has the capability of infinite tabs WITHIN THE TABS!) are wonderful.

Definitely same here. I have so many partly read (mostly barely read) books on my shelves that I don't even attempt to read them anymore. Half true with movies too, but since I can just sit and partake without having to be active to take them in I manage to watch them, but I still pause to surf the internet every ten or twenty minutes. I just get too antsy to keep sitting there doing nothing.

Wait, wait, wait... Soviet-era cartoons? Tell me more.

This.
I also only really watch movies when I'm stoned because it makes me a little less antsy.

Hedgehog in the fog was voted the best animated movie of all time.

It's also pretty damn psychedelic.

Fascinating! I love the hilariously obscure themes of your impulsively-inspired collections. :) And I've certainly operated under the "book research" motive many times. I amassed a monstrous research archive for a book I was writing on filesharing culture but the very nature of the subject matter inevitably rendered it unpublishable.

And roger on the lists. Listmaking is my librarian drug of choice and checking off tasks from Google Keep gives me tiny but frequent endorphin rushes of satisfaction. (I've a similar penchant for metadata organization.)

But honestly - if you ever grow tired of losing your data to drive failure, seriously give me a shout. There are simple and easy habits you can practice to reduce the likelihood of data loss to nearly zero. Simply migrating your beloved lists to Google Docs is perhaps the most immediate change you can make yielding the greatest positive impact on your present routine.

Batlord, youtube has soviet-era children's' shows and short animated films in abundance. Go forth and bask in them!

Hedgehog in the Fog!!!!!! I posted that in the spam thread the other day but it seemed no one bothered to watch it! It's one of the most beautiful animations I have ever seen. I watch it every night before bed.

As someone who was born in the soviet union I strongly approve of this.