When I was in middle school, my brother and I used to record every episode of MST3K onto eight-hour VHS tapes. The show was on late and the jokes were fast, so we wanted to be able to watch them over and over again.

In high school, with the show cancelled, I felt certain that it was going to disappear and I’d never be able to see it again. So I started downloading the episodes from a peer-to-peer network, with a 56kbps modem, and archiving them one by one on custom-labeled CD-Rs. My goal was to have the entire show stored for posterity. By college, the CD-Rs had degraded and the whole collection was worthless. I gave up.

Now it’s 2013, and I can dial up every single episode instantly via YouTube whenever I want.

Huh. Starting to realize I wasted a lot of time.