Physical media is irrelevant. You can have physical media that's so locked down that you don't actually own it. What's actually going to make a comeback is media that you control. If you have a Sony rootkit CD or a DRM-free floc file, the latter beats the former every time. If you have a physical disc of the video game spore which requires you to call into Central servers before writing your video game, or you have a drm-free copy of a similar game that you bought off of Gog, the latter is the only one you actually own. To that end, I've got a multi-disk NAS in mirroring mode with all my media, and I host jellyfin so I can watch it or listen to it using my own personal hardware, without any need to ask a corporate overlord permission to listen to my own music. I do have a large library of ebooks, but I've also got a a very real library of paper books on shelves, and short of coming around door to door, nobody can change the contents of either, but particularly not the dead tree books. It's a big contrast to physical media like what you can get on playstation, xbox, or the Nintendo switch. You can own the physical media for any of these consoles but without an internet connection be totally incapable of playing your games. Something that you increasingly need to pay attention to now is whether the hardware itself requires internet access and access to a central server you do not control. There have been a number of instances where for example people owned thermostats in their home and could not operate their furnace because the servers for the thermostat company had been shut down. Anyone with a Google video game unit should know that since the streaming service has been shut down they can no longer ever play any of the games that they bought for that. Even someone with an old Nintendo Wii my plug it into the wifi today and discover that many of the items on the home screen are like an old shopping mall that's about to shut down -- the old signs are there, but the real estate has been vacant for years. I was fairly lucky because I got to experience with this looks like firsthand over 15 years ago. Around 2008, there was a video game streaming service called gametap. It proposed that you would pay a subscription fee and be able to get access to an entire game library on your PC. Had some really good games on offer too, including the original fallout games. Two things occurred: first, is that streaming service lost the license for that video game, you could not play that video game any longer. Second, if you stop paying the subscription fee, you will lose access to all of your video games, and they also locked your saved games behind a paywall as I recall. That was a very early lesson for me how about the dangers of outsourcing ownership.

Cool thing coming down the pipe on Amazon: "Starting January 20, 2026, Amazon will make it easier for readers to enjoy content they have purchased from the Kindle store across a wider range of devices and applications by allowing new titles published without Digital Rights Management (DRM) to be downloaded in EPUB and PDF format. If you take no action, the DRM-status of your previously published titles will not change but the EPUB and PDF downloads will not be enabled for existing DRM-free titles. If you want to allow reader downloads for these titles, follow the directions below on or after December 9, and select the option not to apply DRM." Meaning that for publishers like me who don't use DRM, people who buy my book will be able to download the DRM-free file without jumping through any hoops. I've already gone in and made the change that will allow downloads when they come online.

Breaking news that Rob Reiner and his wife were murdered, and at this point it looks as if the murder was committed by their son. I was listening to the introduction to an edition of Paradise Lost and Paradise found. It went through the life of John Milton. One of the most interesting points of John Milton's life is that in spite of his greatest work being about God and satan, heaven and hell, and you might assume that he did his very best to live a virtuous life, it is evident from the behavior of his daughters that he was not fulfilling his duty as the family patriarch in the absence of his late wife. They grew up and grew old resenting the man, and through that reflection of his own behavior towards them they ultimately mistreated him in his old age and disability when he lost his sight. Even after death, his daughters were spiteful towards him, and fought his widow for the remainder of his estate, ultimately succeeding at taking most of his assets. In the current era, I feel that there is no more salient lesson than this. The sins of the father do get passed down to their children, and the wages of sin is death. Of course, that's not the whole story. Absolutely, parents can neglect and abuse their children, or spoil them through excess, or simply fail to impart proper values upon them. However, even in the best of circumstances with the best parents available wanting for nothing and being given the best in instruction, some children choose evil, or through physical malady haven't chosen for them. When the parents pay the sins of the children in such a way, you can hardly say it is anything but tragic. I don't know what's the truth of this story is, whether it is 1, or the other, or some combination of the two. But for me, it is a whisper in my ear: Memento Mori. The only way we live on is through our children, and though we have not perfect control over the lives that they live after us they are reflections of us. More than any political advocacy, it is what we leave behind immediately surrounding us that defines our legacy. So if he was the architect of his own destruction, I feel pathos and pity for him, and if he was not the architect of his own destruction, then I feel deep sorrow at hearing of someone's good works crumbling within their lifetime. After a very tiny bit of research, it looks as if that son had been struggling with substance abuse since he was a teenager, even to the extent that he spent quite a bit of time homeless. Those struggles were apparently the subject of one of Reiner's films. The world is vast and broad and you can never really say with certainty anything, but the idea that a teenager with multimillionaire parents becomes addicted to drugs or alcohol does suggest me that it is by the fruit of their tree that you will know them. It isn't mandatory, it isn't written in the stars that substance abuse from their son is automatically the parent's fault, but typically you're going to be looking at either a child who is trying to fill a hole with drugs and I'll call that they can't fill with family life, or a home environment where drugs and alcohol are so readily available that even a teenager can quickly get their hands on it. A third possibility is just that the kid made some very stupid choices very early on and there's nothing anyone else could have done. I can't imagine being an old man slowly bleeding out because my son stabbed me in my life to death. I feel like the thing I would remember the most would be this thought that not only would I be dying but my son would end up dying in prison. The metaphor from Exodus about boiling a calf and it's mother's milk comes to mind.