The Dawn of the Dead box set from Second Sight showed up at my post office at last as well, although just as the regular blu-ray version. I actually bought both the blu AND 4K versions, because I don't want to go through the trouble of having to hunt it down later in the second hand market - and pay the latecomers fee - when/if I finally do get a UHD player.

Oh yeah and I also got the Enterprise engineering playset from Playmates.

I just bought my first Minidisc recorder for the 19 prerecorded discs that I had acquired past weekend. It it is a Sony Mds-Je 500 and it only cost me 25 Euro
in very good shape with a working remote control. I even got a new prerecorded disc with it, a Sony sampler.
I didn't want to spend more than 30 Euro but I simply wanted to have a player to play the discs with. I am very pleased with
the sound. To be honest, it clearly exceeded my expectations. I do not know why. I expected it to sound like Spotify with its compressed sound being played
through my Denon AVR's internal Spotify app but this sounds better without any doubt. I connected the Sony recorder via cinch and the DAC is very good.
Maybe these discs are simply very well mastered. Sometimes when I play a song via Spotify on my new Denon AVR it sounds like coming straight out of the
garbage can. No fun listening to some of the music on Spotify at all.
I also tested the bulk of my prerecorded discs and they play very well without any issues at all. I am very happy with my most recent purchase.

If MD sounds better than Spotify then Spotify clearly sucks. Yes, MD handles it’s low bit rate very well but there are better codecs now and modern broadband is faster than MDs by...one would think at least 1000x. You can easily stream fast enough for better than CD quality so why anything would be sub-MD I can’t imagine...thanks for reminding me to never stream.

MD related: I seem to have gotten the gumstick battery stuck in my all-original still-working MZ-R90. I hope I can get it out easily...

UPDATE: I got it out, cleaned up the contacts, and re-superglued the door closed. I’m using some off brand gum sticks I got off eBay a few years ago and they still work. Some day they won’t and then...I’ll have to use the external battery box I guess. I’ve also noticed that the worm drive makes some resonant noise when it does a full span. After 20+ years maybe I should risk adding a drop of oil?

Several new figures arrived of the past few weeks.

The comedian ( watchmen )
Luke ( black series )
Ant Man and The wast ( Legends )
Venkman ( Plasma series ).

MD still holds it's own to some extent imho. Mainly around seamless shuffle playback.

I have a little Sharp portable MD player which I've kept specifically for the one MD I own, a retail edition of Gescom (by the awesome Autechre). It's a minidisc only retail release. Basically the disc relies on MD's seamless shuffle playback to work as intended.

It's a 45 track album sliced in to 88 segments. The idea being you play the album on shuffle and get a unique, seamless album experience every single time. It's pretty genius stuff, plus Autechre are fantastic so it's win win.

There's rips available as the cost has risen for the MD. But there's nothing physical out there to match the MD experience, hence it remains unique compared to the later CD pressing.

Very interesting. Does it work well if you copy the CD version to an MD yourself? Obviously the gaps have to be frame-perfect.

There is a They Might Be Giants album that has a normal number of normal tracks but also a ton of “fingertips” at the end which are just a ton of songs that are like five seconds long or maybe less. You are encouraged to put the CD on shuffle and have the player randomly insert 1-3 Fingertips before every song.

3x Gamecube Memory Card 59 (DOL-008)
2x Gamecube Memory Card 251 (DOL-014)

Just got a second Dawn of the Dead box set from Second Sight. I initially pre-ordered it from a bunch of different places out of fear of missing out, and I guess I just kind of forgot. I also got the new 4K box set of Total Recall. I think I buy too much stuff when I receive them and then I can't remember what I've bought that'd fit in that particular box.



Think I've enough copies already?

well, streaming can be very good and I like Spotify because they have a lot of stuff the other streaming platforms do not have such as the excellent
Star Trek Ron Jones Project. I have a Spotify account through my family in Indonesia so I only pay like 3 $ a month but it often simply does not sound
very good at all.

I can however recommend Tidal. I found an HD quality stream of the soundtrack to the excellent Truman Show movie. It is absolutely superb and a clear
improvement over the retail CD that I have in my collection and as far as I know Tidal is the only source for this "release".

100% this. I find Tidal to be a great companion to a physical collection, mainly because of the MQA, 360 and Atmos stuff. But you also get videos (including, I think, live concerts?) and other bits and pieces that I think make it worth paying for (assuming you have the equipment that can take advantage of the higher resolution stuff).

Tidal is great too if you happen to be visiting Turkey. Read in to that what you will...

that was one of my favorite movies as a boy when my mom took me to see it in the theater back in '90.

though there are a great many things i hold in a much higher regard thirty years on,
the film nevertheless retains a special place as a childhood favorite...

a side note;

((eight-ish year-old me managed to get my mom and several others in the room in hysterics,
- during the infamous triple-breasted hooker scene, as the one only verbal observation i felt compelled to make
- was a rather loud proclamation of [i]"THREE OF THEM?!?"))[/i]

I perfectly understand what you mean I do the same thing.

I do use one streaming service, although nobody talks about it that way...or even talks about it at all. iTunes Match basically just syncs your iTunes at home with the phone no matter how big the library is. It downloads the tracks on the phone and then clears them out when it needs room with your computer at home being the master library. To me this is better than anything because when I’m on the go I’m much more likely to want to play something I already own from my huge library that took decades to collect than I am going to be wanting to hear...some other thing. I’m sure Tidal is great even though the only thing I remember about it is the insane launch event where millionaires cried about not being rich enough and that’s boner kryptonite for me..I’m sure I’d just never use it. There are only so many hours in the day and I already have MOUNTAINS of stuff. The idea that I would need another faucet for entertainment...I don’t. I haven’t even launched Netflix in a month because I have LDs and Youtube and all the others. In fact just knowing that I’d have to set up yet another user/pass with yet another company makes me completely uninterested.

And the idea that they have “everything” is just laughable. Unless it literally uploads music I made myself or from friends or other non-ASCAP artists, which iTunes Match does, then it will be missing hundreds of tracks. If any other streaming service does that it may change my mind.

Dad's Army S03 (DVD R4)
Dad's Army S04 (DVD R4)
City Hunter (DVD R4)
Story of Ricky aka Riki-Oh (DVD R4)
Lolita (DVD R1)
Jarhead (HD-DVD)
Shooter (HD-DVD)
Knocked Up (HD-DVD)
Hacksaw Ridge (BD)

Sonic The Hedgehog (SMS) - cart only
Sonic The Hedgehog 2 (SMS) - cart only
Land of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse (SMS) - missing manual
The Lucky Dime Caper Starring Donald Duck (SMS) - missing manual
Spiderman (SMS) - missing manual
SpellCaster (SMS) - cart only
World Grand Prix (SMS) - missing manual
Lotus II (Genesis) - cart only
The Adventures of Batman & Robin (Megadrive)
Ecco The Tides of Time (Megadrive) - Platinum Collection
Motocross Championship (Sega 32X) - cart only
Official Australian PlayStation Magazine Demo 34 (PS1) [SCED-01831] - disc only
Official Australian PlayStation Magazine Demo 35 (PS1) [SCED-02632] - disc only
PT Boats Knights of the Sea (PC)
Mario Strikers Charged Football (Wii)

They most certainly do not have everything. I have already found tons of stuff that is unavailable on all of the known streaming sites ( Spotify, Tidal, etc. ), for instance:

- Grace Jones - Slave to the Rhythm
- Mosquito Coast Soundtrack
- Madonna - Gambler ( name of a song )

and much much more.

But they have a lot of stuff in HD quality that is unavailable on any other physical format ( no SACD, DVD-Audio, etc. ). I also have Amazon Music. They have a lot of great stuff, too.
I love music and I want to listen to it in the best quality available. Vinyl is my favourite format as it sounds superb in my view, even better than SACD in my opinion.

I now watch a lot of films via the Criterion Channel streaming service. I think it is better than Netflix because Netflix mostly has Blockbuster films however this streaming service has a very
interesting catalogue.

Land of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse (SMS) - missing manual
The Lucky Dime Caper Starring Donald Duck (SMS) - missing manual
Underrated Master System games.
Lucky dime is so much fun

Netflix’s problem is that it doesn’t really have a decent selection of movies, blockbuster or otherwise. It’s all “binge” crap for the most part. The stuff I signed up to watch 15 years ago is gone.

I do need to check out the Criterion service though.

I am really enjoying Amazon Music HD.

Officially the service is exclusive to the US and you won't be able to register with a foreign IP address however it is very easy to sign up via VPN and once you have
signed up you are able to login and start all streams even with a foreign IP address and it works great here in Germany.

Netflix occasionally has some good stuff ( documentaries, etc. ) but too much blockbuster stuff I am not interested in. I most definitely prefer the Criterion's own
streaming service.

Nowadays I hardly buy films only laserdiscs occasionally and mostly vinyl or retail CDs, minidiscs or tapes. I stream most of my films and there are other great and
inexpensive options, too, that I won't mention here.



I like Amazon Music HD because they have some very good albums in HD quality such as the entire Herbie Hancock or Vangelis discography. There is also stuff missing
and all the Queens albums are CD quality only, unfortunately. To me, I do not hear a difference between 192 khz and 96 khz / 24 bit but I do hear a clear difference between 48 khz / 24 bit
and 44.1 khz / 16 bit CD quality. Anything above 48 khz / 24 bit is undistinguishable to my ears.

Pretty sure my Faces LDs qualify, since they're only for shelf display at this point (anytime I want to watch pre-SE, I just watch 4K77/DespecializedESB/4K83).



The Blu-Ray shelf is now full, to the point that I'm triaging discs I've watched but likely won't watch again to attic storage, sale, or donation... it's not as painful as it sounds since the shelf holds ~220 discs, I've offloaded the boxsets and DVDs to another storage location, and probably 75% of the BD discs are Goodwill purchases at ~$3/disc.