It’s the end of a physical media era.

*

There are people on this planet with opinions and thoughts… and they don’t know what these are.

All of us old geezers remember what life was like back in the day.

Which was a Tuesday, by the way.

Back in the day before streaming was a thing, Netflix was this service where you’d rent DVDs online. Totally radical, right? You’d go on a weird looking website, make your selections, have em sent to your house, and then after your time was up, you’d drop ’em back in the envelope and send ’em back. It was a weird time in the stone age, and evidently, they still do the mail order movie service to this day.

That’s right, fellow millennials! When you and I were stealing mom and dad’s password for some “Netflix and Chill” back in the early 2010s, people were still getting their grubby paws on a disc to see Jerry Maguire for the 99th time.

Ask your teen to mail a letter and let me know if their reaction is in any way similar to this.

But mail no further! Netflix has officially announced that their mail order service is coming to an end. Remember when I wrote “They still do the mail order movie service to this day” just above? I meant it literally. To this day.

25 years. From 1998 until now. And it’s over.

Does anyone feel a little bit sad? I do. Honestly, with Blockbuster disappearing, I felt that it was such a huge blow to physical media, and now you need to search out a niche, vintage style store that goes out of their way to offer such a service in order to rent a physical copy of a movie.

Heck, I can’t remember the last time I walked into a store, bought a video game, and brought it home. You just go on the interweb and scream “GIB IT TO MEH” at the ones and zeroes, and the robots have no choice but to listen to you. Which will totally never have any repercussions in the future. We have never once made any sort of movie or television show about how inherently petrified we are that something we created could be stronger than us.

Just kidding, Mary Shelley was warning us about this as far back as 1818.

Some say Frankenstein’s Monster was the first robot. It’s me. I am Some.

I consider it an end of an era and it makes me feel absolutely ancient.

But hey, I’ll get through it.

If I could get through the death of MSN Messenger, I can get through the death of movie rentals.

Thanks for reading, love you lots, and as always,

– Erik