Dobes Zone

 In January, I discovered I had a bunch of isopods (aka pillbugs, rolypolies, woodlice, carpenters, etc) living in a Rubbermaid tub of soil that I was over-wintering. The soil had come from my little balcony garden, where some of my plants didn't survive the colder months. I was quite surprised to see them in there since I didn't expect these tiny moisture loving bugs to make the journey up to my second story balcony. I wasn't entirely sure what to do with them.      After some thinking I opted to dispose of the soil and use the tub for storage, but I wanted to see if I could save some of the isopods and keep them in a small terrarium. I started with a large squared glass jar from Michael's, a couple scoops of soil from the tub, plenty of isopods, and a couple spider plant babies from my garden plants. Many people are now keeping different isopod species as pets and I thought it looked neat enough to try myself.  I added in some leaf litter from my balcony ...

      Without intending to, I had a tweet about physical media collecting and file collecting go a bit viral (sigh) and I've decided to make a little introductory post on how to start collecting both physical media and digital media- including making back-ups, digitizing things in your collection, and organizing. It won't be fully comprehensive and some aspects of collecting requires spending some money and having space for things- do what's reasonable for you and your goals . I definitely don't expect everyone to be able to spend money, but if you can pay for several streaming services per month you can probably afford to cut back on those and instead invest in some real media or some digital downloads. Someone's gotta own these movies, might as well be me.      This post will be focusing mostly on movies/TV and music, since those are the things we rely on streaming the most for. I'm also working on the assumption that you have a computer- a desktop ...