In light of Sony killing game discs, I couldn't help but reminisce about the days when CDs were the dominant physical format for all forms of media.
One of my greatest regrets apart from purging some of my old posts is getting rid of a bunch of CDs in my possession. I miss the music mostly, but some old films come to mind once in a while. I've tried to recreate some playlists from memory, but I fear I was too young then to fully trust my memory. A large chunk of it is lost to time, but I've relived some in their digital format.
Garfield (2004) remains one of my favourite movies, and not because it's amazing but mostly because it was one of the first CDs I owned and watched over and over again. I even think of the length of movies in terms of how many discs they used up. The Sound of Music (1965) will forever be a three-disc movie, even if I watch it digitally.
Like many Kenyan households, I used to have a collection of discs of pirated media. You'd visit your favourite cyber cafe and have a killer playlist ripped onto a disc or grab the latest trending movie. Heck, you'd struggle to pick what to buy out of the many 80-in-1 CDs of glorious 360p movies squeezed onto them. We didn't know any better, but enjoyed it nonetheless. If you were privileged enough to have a home computer, you'd toy around with burning CDs yourself. I mean even our parents knew how to do that. It's an indulgence that's altogether disappeared, for valid reasons, and a future 'story time' moment of the good ol' days (picture the 'old man yells at cloud' meme).
Who knows, maybe one day I'll write about flash drives. That's totally within the realm of possibility; I mean an eight-year-old kid recently asked me what they were when they found some of mine. So yes, a future piece on the good ol’ days of flash drives is totally possible.