So, about a month ago I got fed up with my YouTube feed being complete shit. I didn’t feel satisfied with it anymore, it’s started to have trouble recommending things to me. Like, I’ll refresh, and it’ll have one or two new videos, whatever handful of videos I’ve been watching repeatedly at the moment (I think at the time it was a lot of DankPods videos and Animusic reuploads), and then it’ll very quickly switch to recommending stuff from my Watch Later, which to me indicates it’s out of ideas. I’ve even had it recommend playlists I’ve created, of videos I uploaded, and frankly I’d certainly hope I’d like those videos, given they’re mine and I made them.

I’ve also had this really weird quirk that bugs me, where the sidebar recommendations will have something totally random in the third spot down the list. Usually some random video uploaded 2 hours ago with 5 views, or something completely unrelated to my interests (a few days ago I got one on how to make AI-generated clickbait TikToks about Lionel Messi, which is appalling on multiple levels), and usually it’s something I can’t comprehend cause it’s in a random language I don’t recognize. I don’t know why this bugs me so much, but it’s most likely due to it making no sense to me.

I’ve done heavy modification to my YouTube experience, installing stuff like ad blockers and YouTube ReVanced, mostly to ensure I never see another fucking YouTube Short ever again (I’m positive there’s good, quality content to be found in the TikTok style, but it’s not worth slogging through the manure pile of stolen content, AI-generated slop, and weaponized earworms to get to it). I do admittedly pay for YouTube Premium, which I did before switching to ReVanced and didn’t feel like cancelling since

1. I have a discounted plan as a college student, and
2. I use YouTube Music extensively and quite like it, its algorithm is way more consistent and reliable and recommends plenty of disco music, synthwave, and city pop to listen to (can you tell I don’t really care for top 40?).

On top of feeling discontent with YouTube’s recommendations, channels that I used to rely on for fun, cozy videos to help escape from the depressing state of the world, suddenly wanted to start talking more and more about the depressing state of the world. I’ll admit I’ve unsubbed from channels for that, because at a certain point (usually when current events are consistently the main topic), it’s just not fun anymore. Maybe I don’t want to think about the bleak, horrible, depressing state of the world, leading towards a future that’s completely unpredictable, inescapable, and capable of destroying everything I know and love, you ever think of that?

After talking about my gripes with YouTube to some friends in VRchat, they recommended I give regular TV shows another try. At the time, a few of them had mentioned a show called Farscape to me, some 90s sci-fi show I’d never heard of, but looked promising. (I remember they specifically described it as “Star Trek on drugs”.) I expressed interest in trying it and watched the first two episodes with them.

So, I don’t want to get too much into explaining the show, mostly because I don’t think I’ll do a particularly great job, but the general premise is that an astronaut (John Crichton) gets caught in a wormhole and shot into some distant corner of the universe. He’s picked up by a starship piloted by a group of escaped convicts and form a ragtag team of various alien species, with all characters aboard ultimately searching for their respective home planets. Episodic hijinks ensue, with each episode running about 45 minutes.

While I enjoy the characters and lore, and the episodes tend to be excellent with some fun ideas (at least from what I’ve seen, I’m currently in the middle of season 2 while I’m writing this), the part that impresses me most is the special effects. Farscape was an American-Australian joint production spearheaded by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop and Hallmark Entertainment (of all companies; who’d have known they were capable of making something other than cheesy romance flicks?), and due to the Creature Shop’s involvement, Farscape is chock full of great practical effects and puppetry. Two of the main characters (Rygel and Pilot) are fully puppeted and they look fantastic, Pilot especially. Another crewmate (D’Argo) has blood that bleeds out pure black when cut, and the wound needs to be stimulated until the blood is clear-colored to prevent infection. Very rarely will CGI be used at all, usually only for spaceship exteriors or when a puppet just won’t do. In a season 2 episode I watched the other day, a character gets his arm dissolved clean off via acid, bones and all, and it’s all done practically, it was as impressive as it was disgusting to watch.

So while I did check to see what streaming services were carrying Farscape, and nearly used streaming to watch since it was on Amazon Prime and I happen to have that, I decided to get a DVD box set instead. A few years ago I actually used to run a Plex media server. My dad collects movies on DVD and BluRay and has over 1000 titles, so I thought it’d be a fun project to rip them all and make it more convenient for him to watch them, either streamed somewhere within the house or out and about. But I ended up being the one who used the server most, and I usually used it to watch various movies in my dad’s collection. It even supported a DVR function for recording over-the-air TV, which I used to record all the seasonal holiday TV specials (Charlie Brown, Frosty, Rudolph, etc) so I never had to worry again about missing when they aired. But eventually I fell out of using it, which led to the server falling into disuse and disrepair. I did want to get it back up and running, but I haven’t managed to do that just yet (it used to run on an Nvidia SHIELD TV box, which apparently is no longer supported, so I need to find something else to run the server software on). So right now I’m just ripping the discs and keeping them on a portable hard drive for out-and-about use.

After a bit of looking around, I happened to find a complete set of Farscape at my local Half Price Books. It was a bit more expensive there than on eBay, $50 vs $35 plus shipping, but it was in stellar condition and I could take it home with me that day if I wanted to, so I did. I also found copies of Firefly and Animusic 2 on DVD, both under $10 each, leading me to determine it to be my best Half Price Books trip yet. That same weekend I went to a retro games convention that had a used copy of the SpongeBob “First 100 Episodes” box set for $4. It’s the first 5 seasons of the show, the highly-regarded first two seasons made by Stephen Hillenburg, and then seasons 3-5 that were made without him but were still pretty solid, at the very least I have nostalgia for these episodes and remember watching them as a kid. The price was so low because it was missing disc 6, but I bought it anyway since either way that’s a lot of SpongeBob for so cheap. In addition, there’s two otherwise identical versions of this set with one removing the banned episode “Mid-Life Crustacean”, and this was the version that included it (on disc 7), so I went on eBay and bought a different used copy that was missing disc 2 so I could replace my missing disc 6. And other than now having a copy in my closet (that I don’t know what to do with) that was only discs 1-7 of a 14-disc set, now also missing discs 2 and 6, and costing me double what the other set cost, I’m very happy with this set. The case could be in better condition, it has some water damage, but the discs are scratch-free and I have that pesky banned episode. (I’m the type who agrees with banned episodes being removed from broadcast if they’re in poor taste nowadays, but never from a box set.) I’ve been meaning to pick up the SpongeBob set for a long while now, as it was one of my favorite shows when I was a kid and it’s nice just being able to fill an 11-minute period of downtime with a quick episode of something fun and nostalgic. (And without having to pay for Paramount+, but I’ll get to that later.)

Speaking of shows I liked when I was a kid, another set I got just the other day was seasons 1-5 of Star Wars: The Clone Wars. I was a Nickelodeon kid growing up, but I did dabble with the other kids stations, and Clone Wars was the main thing that brought me to Cartoon Network. I wanted to see if there was a “complete series” set that included the Disney-made season 7 (which brought the show back from cancellation to give it a proper ending), but most of what I found was bootleg copies. It seems Disney has been pretty bad at releasing physical copies of their animated Disney+ Star Wars shows, you can get The Mandalorian on 4K BluRay if you want but not stuff like Bad Batch or Visions. This has become a recurring theme when looking around for box sets, it shouldn’t be surprising that “popular show” and “out-of-print” is a nasty and frustrating combo. (I’m still looking for a legit Serial Experiments Lain box set that’s sub-$100.) But eventually I managed to find an official seasons 1-5 set for $35, about the same price as what the bootlegs were going for (the reseller must’ve just looked on eBay and seen similar-looking sets going for that much, and thought “I’ll just price mine that much”). It’s a really nice set, to be honest, it includes a hardcover art book and an episode guide in addition to the discs. I very much appreciate when box sets include episode guides, it bugs me when they’re not included, to the point where I will make my own if it doesn’t come with one.

I have several other box sets in my collection that I obtained a few years back, but I don’t have much to say on them since most are very barebones. I’m not too upset if a box set doesn’t come with a ton of bonus features, a lot of the time I’m buying a budget set in one of those giant plastic cases with the disc binders, cause I don’t mind the case and extras being kinda lacking if you’re offering me the entire Eccleston and Tennant era of Doctor Who for $20. Plus, the budget sets take up less space on a shelf, and my shelf is ever-overflowing. But to quickly go over the rest of my TV-on-DVD collection:

• Avatar: The Last Airbender. Picked this up for $20 at the same retro games convention last year, discs are in fine condition and I had just finished watching the show with a friend after he had to nearly strap me to a chair to get me to try it. (If I hear about a show endlessly, praise or not, it makes me want to watch it less since I’d like to pick the show of my own accord, rather than feeling some need to follow trends. That’s why I haven’t seen Breaking Bad, or Squid Game, or The Boys, etc, etc, you get the point.)
• Cowboy Bebop, both the series and the movie. I really wish they’d bundle these together, you can fit up to six discs in a regular DVD case and it’s six discs altogether (5 discs for the show, a separate 1-disc case for the movie), but it’s whatever I suppose. A classic anime series that needs no introduction.
• Death Note, the first anime I ever watched that wasn’t Pokemon. A 10-disc set in a slipcase, pretty standard fare. I once dressed up as Light for Halloween and it was as cringe as you’d expect. Probably worse. High school Eric was still finding himself.
• Ghost Stories. A 3-disc set containing a dub that will live in infamy, although it does have Japanese audio with subtitles if you prefer that instead. For some reason.
• Invader Zim, a little disappointed I didn’t find this when I was a kid, although it’s definitely for the best that I didn’t. There’s a more modern release that’s this weird made-to-order DVD-R thing, went ahead and just passed on that. This older set is much nicer and includes fun extras, including but not limited to Irken subtitles. 6 discs altogether, spread across 3 volumes, the first of which I got signed by Richard Horvitz!
• Star Trek: The Original Series. I actually got this as an early Christmas present from a friend this year, a decision made after I got him a Doctor Who box set last year (a $50 Walmart shrink-wrap bundle of the aforementioned budget sets, going from Eccleston to Capaldi). I plan on binging this once I’m done with Farscape. It’s another budget set, 25 discs in one of the worst cases I’ve ever seen, it’s got discs stacked on top of one another and you’ll feel like you’ll damn near snap them in half trying to get them out. But considering I’ll probably only ever take them out once to rip them, I can live with that. An episode guide is printed on the back of the cover, which is much appreciated, even if the discs block it entirely and I have to take the cover out of the case to read it.

There’s a feeling I’ve had ever since getting these, and one I just can’t get over: healing. It’s just really nice to have these DVD sets on my shelf, accessible to me whenever I want, and not have to worry about paying monthly subscription fees to 20 different streaming services like I’m buying cable all over again. Some services I’d only ever use for one or two shows (honestly I’d prefer not to browse Paramount+ and see the further enshittification of SpongeBob and its two spinoffs that Stephen Hillenburg never would’ve allowed if he were still alive), and in an age where you can’t count on streaming services to keep the shows they produced and own on their service, regardless of popularity (Warner Bros has ensured I will never, EVER pay for HBO Max), it’s comforting to know that these are mine for keeps. The streaming services could literally shut down and I’d still have the ability to watch my shows. And by ripping the discs, I can have the benefits of both physical and digital, have my cake and eat it too.

The picture quality compared to streaming isn’t that bad either, streaming tends to fluctuate in quality depending on connection and what device you’re watching on, and I’d argue that DVD is at the very least acceptable, if not good. I’ve been very impressed at the picture quality on some of these sets, especially the Star Trek one, as me and my friend were both pleasantly surprised when we put on a few episodes together. Comparing my Clone Wars box set to Disney+, there’s definitely less fine detail, but it doesn’t really matter. The show’s there, in good quality, and I can still make out all the details that I need to. I wouldn’t be against upgrading to a BluRay set in the future, but I don’t consider HD a necessity. My family never has, actually, most of my dad’s collection is DVD, although we have picked up more BluRays over time from combo packs and whatnot. Despite owning some 4K TVs, however, we own zero 4K content, and I question if I’d even notice the extra detail anyway. Have someone sit in front of two screens, equal distance from both, with one playing 4K content and the other playing 1080p content, and I bet you they’ll at least have trouble telling the difference. In other words, meh.

So yeah, that’s just some thoughts I had about DVDs. I plan on continuing to collect these and talking about them, cause if nothing else they’re just neat to have.