Because I have such a voracious appetite for books, DVDs, and CDs, I end up with a lot of media that I’ll never feel the need to experience again. Take The Deer Hunter, for example. De Niro, Streep, Walken, Cazale—the acting is perfect. It’s a heartbreaking story, and I’m glad I watched it.
Seriously, though… it’s more than three hours long. They don’t even get to Vietnam until the first hour has past. The pace is deliberate, and the tension is ratcheted up so high for the last 2/3rds of the movie that it feels like the walls are closing in on you. I could only watch it once. But I’d purchased the DVD (it was barely more than it would cost to rent it), and it would have sat on my shelf for another decade, until the next technological advance phased DVDs out completely.
So I went to Swaptree and traded it for a copy of Silence of the Lambs.
I’ve only got a couple dozen items left on the site, and my offers have slowed down to a crawl—I generally only get one or two trades offered per week now, and only one gets accepted. But there are a lot of similar sites (Paperback Swap, Titletrader, Peerswap, LaLa) where I can try to upgrade some of these things. Still, there are some things that will probably never get requested. I have two CDs by a group called the TriChromes. I’ve never heard of them. I don’t know where I got them. I’ll never be able to trade them. At the end of the year, I just need to bite the bullet and Freecycle whatever’s left.
