A Love Letter to Physical Media

Anthony

I do not know how to have an online presence without feeling weird about it.

Turning 25 drastically increased my anxiety about how I’m perceived (quarter-life crisis). As I’ve gotten older, the use of social media has become less tied to how I interact with my social circle. Now that my prefrontal cortex is as developed as it will ever be, I see how social media acts more as a barrier to connecting with others. Joining the workforce and becoming an adult has drastically changed my perspective on social media. My digital persona feels like molten skin that I’m trying to shed, but it keeps getting caught on my foot, and now I’m stuck dragging it along.

At this point in my life, Letterboxd and Substack are the only websites that I get excited to use. Sharing anything personal anywhere else on the internet feels so disingenuous and performative. On Substack, the general population is simply here for the love of the game (like personal essays about digital cleanses and monthly book/movie lists). I have an easier time sharing life-changing news here because this takes more effort for me to write and you to read than an Instagram caption.

With that said, here’s some big life news: I became a dad! I’ve known about this new journey since August of last year. Since then, I’ve thought endlessly about the characteristics and habits that make up the father that I want to be. And the best way I could express it is physical media. As far as this newsletter is concerned, I’d like to talk about the living conclusions to consuming media that I have come up with. I don’t want to be rigid and stuck in the way that I view things—one of the characteristics I want my kid to be surrounded by :)

Movies

I want to preserve two experiences of watching movies for my kid. The first is the joy of using a portable DVD player. I have a lot of fond memories watching movies during roadtrips, late at night in my room, wherever the nearest outlet was. This is the only screen my kid will have unlimited access to. For the longest time, this has been at the top of Keila’s thrift holy grail list. The thrifting gods blessed us with a player, case, and cables for both home and the car. Since then, we’ve been collecting DVDs from our childhood so we can share them with him.

Once he is old enough, we’ll sift through the DVD sections at the few stores that have them left. We’ll pick the movie for our Friday night together. I’d like to replace the mindless/endless scrolling through streaming services, trying to find the perfect thing to watch.

I’d also like to show the kid that watching a movie is an experience worth dedicating attention and time to. Streaming services have made it easier than ever to watch movies from any decade or country possible. I can rent Parasite online for $3 and watch it on a smart fridge in an electronics store. At the same time, I can take an entire month watching Kraven the Hunter by only playing it in the background while I wash dishes or work. It might have even been a good source of white noise to help my kid fall asleep.

I want to have movie nights, I want to sift through our movie collection and pick one that we’ll watch together as a family. I want to take my kid out of school to watch the 15th Anniversary of Dune. Whatever it is, I want to make room for watching movies as an experience.

Music

Unlike with movies, my experience with music has never really changed. I never experienced the era of listening to only albums at a time. I’ve always had unrestricted access to any song ever. My mom taught me how to use Limewire to upload music to my iPod pretty early on in life. It wasn’t until I moved up to Seattle that I started taking my discovery of new artists and genres seriously. Instead of solely listening to my 1000+ liked songs playlist on shuffle, I used every available feature Spotify, YouTube, and TikTok have to find new music. This gave me a good breadth of artists and genres. I shifted to listening to complete albums and discographies to deepen my appreciation for artists I really appreciate. I started with the bands I grew up with. Red Hot Chili Peppers, Queen, The Strokes, and Daft Punk. Each artist/song/album was completely recontextualized.

It didn’t take me long before the algorithm on every music service started regurgitating the same artists and songs. This is when I expanded my record collection and started collecting CDs. Let me tell you something about thrift store CD sections. Sifting through those shelves has been like mining for diamonds. If you give up looking after the 32nd Josh Groban Christmas album, you’ll never find the soundtrack to Drumline or Shrek.

Books (from The Library)

I used to be obsessed with reading. When I found a book I really enjoyed, I would spend every waking moment reading just so I could finish it. I read while walking to school or after my bedtime with a flashlight underneath the covers. I even would skip whole paragraphs of whatever I was reading, just from how excited I was to finish the story. This would inevitably lead to burning out and quitting reading entirely for months at a time. I’d like to share that same passion for reading with my son, but only a healthy amount. I think the perfect way to do so would be to make The Library our third place.

I’ve come to learn that the library will meet you wherever you are. In high school, it was a place for my friends to find as many ways as possible to never get work done. In college, I discovered what the Criterion Collection was and that my library had a sizable amount from their catalog. I like to think my tuition covered the entire movie section they had. Now, my little family of three is making plans to go to the various story times they host so my kid can socialize and have fun. The Library will be our safe haven, and I want him to discover reading and the different places it’ll take him.

Anthony doesn’t know that I’m adding this. Surprise!

I’ve thought about how to celebrate Anthony’s first Father’s Day, and after reading his intro, I agree that Substack feels like a great place to share something personal.

A note to my baby brother on his first Father’s Day:

It’s an odd experience to see your younger sibling become a parent. Every time I look at Anthony, no matter how old he gets, I still see the dorky little kid that I grew up with. So you can imagine how weird it is to see a newborn look more and more like that dorky little kid I met twenty-five years ago. It feels like I’m watching a franchise reboot where they hire a nepo baby to play the character his dad originated and I can’t stop saying “holy shit he looks so much like his dad did back then.”

Anthony has only been a dad for two months at this point, but he was fuckin’ born to do this, y’all. He and Keila are so intentional in every way they approach parenting. They truly understand how taking care of their son starts with taking care of themselves and each other, and it’s beautiful to witness.

As an older sibling, I take pride in being a person Anthony can come to for advice, since I’ve done a lot of things before him, and my experiences could help him navigate life more easily that I was able to. So when I found out that he was going to be a parent, I realized this was going to be the first time that I won’t be able to help him with my experiences. That was terrifying.

But that fear melted away the moment I first saw Keila holding their son and Anthony looking down at his family with pure joy. I knew then that they’d be just fine.

I’ll end with a wise quote I once saw (in the comments of a TikTok) that sums up how I feel about my nephew’s incredible parents: “I can’t wait to know a man that’s raised by you.”

Happy Father’s Day!

Livia

I recently bought a Blu-ray player.

I’ve been talking about doing this for a very long time, but I wanted to wait until they were not super expensive (the cheapest one I found was on Amazon for $80, which felt crazy). I didn’t really need one for a while because there are so many movies available for streaming, so it didn’t seem like a necessity, and would constantly be pushed down my wishlist. Then, a series of three important things happened:

I couldn’t find The Village on any streaming service.

I have a short list of movies that I watch at least every quarter. Right now, it’s My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Steel Magnolias, Lars and the Real Girl, and The Village. When I have an urge to watch one of these, it’s pretty intense. Essentially, I need to watch it right at that moment, or I won’t be able to watch anything else. Recently, my spirit moved me to watch The Village. To my horror, when I searched for where to watch it on JustWatch, I couldn’t find it anywhere. And I’m not going to rent it on Amazon. Especially when I have a DVD of it sitting in my TV stand.

Clearing my watchlist was becoming a challenge.

Every year, I come up with some random challenge for myself. Last year, I tasked myself to read a book a week.

This year, I wanted to watch all 300 movies on my Letterboxd watchlist. I thought this would be easy enough, but then I had to skip so many movies because they were not on a single streaming service. Not even on Tubi for God’s sake. And again, I’m not going to rent them on Amazon, what am I? An animal??

Sebastian wanted to watch When Harry Met Sally.

As you could probably guess, when it’s time to pick a movie for movie night, I usually pick the movie we watch. I always ask Sebastian if he has a specific request, but he usually says no and lets me pick. But one day, he uncharacteristically said he wanted to watch When Harry Met Sally for the first time. I was thrilled! Then, as I searched where to watch it, it said our only option was to rent on fucking Amazon or God forbid, the Fandango app. I was furious. This could happen to me, but for this to happen to my sweet, sweet Sebastian? I couldn’t bear it. I had to bite the bullet. Something had to give.

So, I found a Blu-ray player at Walmart for only $60. I christened it with a viewing of my beloved The Village.