Downloading Fanatic Doesn't Know When To Stop

Who knew that cartoon women could look this good?

David, a self-proclaimed pop culture junkie, downloads anything and everything from the Internet, and records hour-after-hour of network television on his digital video record. In fact, David has accumulated thousands of hours of material, everything from Akira To Zoolander, enough visual entertainment to keep him on his couch for years. But to get to the couch, David will first need to pull himself out of his computer chair.

David, 31, lives at home, and his mom takes care of most of the cooking, cleaning, and the shopping. He doesn't work, but makes a modest living from a pay-subscription David Hasslehoff fansite, and a disability settlement resulting from the time he accidentally ran in front of an ice cream truck.

David claims to have over 1,800 copied DVDs, 560 satellite-recorded VHS cassette tapes, and nearly 5,000 CD-Rs encoded with popular movies, television series, and cartoons. In addition to his massive movie library, he has over 900 gigabytes of "anime" (Japanese Animation) on his hard-drives.

David's theory is that one day, television will be a thing of the past, and only the super-rich will be able to afford to go to the movies. And when film and television has become a thing of the past, outlawed as subversive propaganda or crushed beneath the weight of greedy capitalists, David thinks he will be the one laughing at society.

"I've got every season of Red Dwarf ripped onto rewritable DVDs," bragged David. "I've divx'ed all of the seasons of all of the Star Treks ever made. I've got 14 years worth of The Simpsons copied on Real Media (lower quality), plus all of the MPEg'ed episodes of Babylon 5, Farscape, Futurama, South Park, and Lexx. I've got screeners of every science fiction movie ever bootlegged, and one day, when I have eventually completed my downloading, I will actually watch it all."

In addition to the ever-growing video collection, David has 240 gigabytes of MP3s, a 95,000 music archive that he could listen to from now until a sequel for Battlefield Earth is made without having to hear the same one twice.

"When television becomes illegal and every episode of Webster, Family ties, and Matlock has been destroyed by an oppressive totalitarian government, making classic American television sitcoms more valuable than gold, diamonds, or Mountain Dew," asked David, "who will they come crying to? Me!"

You might say that David is preparing for the collapse of the Internet, and wants to grab as much as he can before it's too late. It's just scanning the Internet for torrent files, decoding and decompressing zipped movie files, renaming titles, removing commercials, filing, sorting, and burning things to disk leaves little or no time to watch the finished products.

"I'm pretty confident that I could plant myself down on my couch for at least three straight years (forgiving personal needs)," said David. "The rest of the world will be weeping at the loss of broadcast media, while I'll be nestled away with every ripped episode of Superman, Batman, Spiderman, and the Justice League easily available on my home computer network for my own personal enjoyment."

Some say David is simply "cocooning," buffering himself against the need to ever leave his nest...err, basement suite. David will tell you he's a servant to pop culture, protecting against the day that aliens destroy civilization's ability to broadcast entertainment media, or when the television and Internet "fads" goes away and everyone in the world focuses on wholesome family values, like reading books or playing board games on Saturday nights.

But David isn't lazy. He is an active individual--he's always actively backing up his favourite spy movies, space operas, and sitcoms on to digital media. It's just that David has spent so much time, downloading, burning, downloading, and copying that he hasn't had any time to watch any of his "collection."

If TV ever goes the way of the dodo or The Lone Gunmen ,or if David ever learns to stop collecting, and start watching, he's going to have plenty of time to work-in that ass-groove on his good-as-new couch. We just hope that he doesn't become the story for a Six Feet Under episode before he has had a chance to watch it.