How Can We Bear to Throw Anything Away?

I don’t mean to brag, but I’ve seen video games pre-release. No, no, please hold your  applause, I’m just an everyday man. But several different times, I’ve had the privilege  of seeing an early build of an unreleased game, one that “the public” hasn’t gotten to  see.

These are almost always NDA’d to hell, I am always very much Not Allowed to talk about  the specific games or builds that I’ve seen. The truth is, there’s not that much to say. Games  in progress are typically like finished games, except worse.

They feel less good to control, the  sound design is absent, much of the environment is made out of placeholders. Assuming that you don’t,  like, die before the finished game comes out, that final product is almost always the one that  is more interesting and rewarding to play. BUT SOMETIMES, very infrequently,  I’ve run across a situation that’s different.

It’s not that the game has been better  pre-release, but I have been privy to developers trying to decide between a couple very different  routes a game could go down. I know, ultimately, they’ll choose one route and the other options  will just disappear forever. And when I’ve been present at those crossroads moments,  I always think…“someone should save this.

” This is not a thought you’re allowed to have  when under NDA for a big organization. Even if I did save something, which I am very much  Not Allowed to Do, my hard drive would probably burn out before I could legally do anything  interesting with it, and that’s assuming that anyone cares as much as I do about this random  thing that didn’t ultimately end up happening. Sometimes, if we’re very lucky, game studios  will do that work themselves.

Something like DoubleFine’s documentaries preserve  these discarded ideas and conversations, sometimes art books or developer presentations  will key us into visions of the game that never happened. But examples of this are both rare  and limited; even the documentary PsychOdyssey, which is over 20 hours long, is only showing us  glimpses. Any future research on Double Fine will be bound by what previous documentarians chose to  capture, and what the studio chose to preserve.

What’s left out of that picture? And how  incredible would it be to get that same level of insight into Shadow of the Colossus,  or Super Metroid, or Metal Gear Solid 4? So I have this impulse to squirrel things away. 

It is an impulse I ignore, but I cannot deny the thought. Even if I was to start saving stuff,  I would also be a total amateur. Just me and a little hard drive full of secrets.

What would I  even do with it? But in the realm of video game history, this is kind of how it works! [“We would  have nothing if it weren’t for people taking some risks with that stuff.

Maybe taking stuff or  sharing stuff that they’re not supposed to, or maybe accidentally left it at their desk  or accidentally left it outside or something along those lines. We owe so much of what we  know about video game history to people…at least bending the law, if not  outright breaking it. ”] — My concerns about records of development disappearing does feel a little  like worrying about singeing my breakfast toast while the city outside burns to the ground. 

The Video Game History Foundation recently published their findings that 87% of classic  games are essentially unavailable [“The way the law is set up in the US, your only option  for 87% of these games are uhh, piracy or maintaining expensive collectibles”]. And,  for the record, “classic games” is defined as games through 2009. Halo 3 is a classic game  at this point.

Mirror’s Edge is a classic game. Super Mario Galaxy is a classic game. This is, as the foundation points out, just slightly better than the survival  rate of pre-World War 2 audio recordings, and worse than the availability of American  Silent Films.

The entirety of the existence of this medium could be contained within a lifetime–  my parents lifetime! – and yet most of it does not exist outside inaccessibly priced classic hardware  and iffy rom sites that could disappear tomorrow. [“Piracy is great, but it is not- it can’t  be the only solution for things.

We can’t be relying just on the curation of pirates and the  help of pirates to make sure everything is safe. If there’s no other way to access these things, we  are gatekeeping a big part of history. Libraries should be allowed to share these games with people  in a way that is slightly more convenient than ‘you can walk into your library, they can plop  a ps2 that they’re maintaining on the counter, they can put in a disc, and you can play through  all of Kingdom Hearts right there.

It should be- you know, if you want to learn about Shakespeare,  it’s not like you have to go to a weird discord to learn about how to do that. Why should it  be the case for learning about Miyamoto? ”] What Kelsey says makes sense.

The current  copyright law is designed to “protect” the industry’s ability to sell things. It is not  designed with any safeguards against companies burning their own history to make their profit  line go up. Depending on your region the Wii had more than twice as many games available on  its virtual console in 2009 as the Switch does now.

Digital storefronts continue to shut down.  The 3DS, the Wii U, gone. Literally the morning I wrote this paragraph, the news broke that  the Xbox 360 store will be closing next year, meaning that hundreds of non-backwards-compatible  games will essentially disappear.

Here’s the thing I’m not supposed to say.  Sometimes…I struggle to care as much as I feel like I’m supposed to. This is probably in  part because of the false safety net of piracy, that if I wanted I could probably search for  “whatever game ISO” and get it running.

But I also scroll through the list of games  not backwards compatible on the Xbox 360, games that will truly go away when the storefront  goes down, and it’s like…Your Shape: Fitness Evolved. Or Tiger Woods PGA Tour 12. Or Turbo:  Super Stunt Squad.

And I look at those and think, would we really be losing important historical  artifacts if these became unavailable? And even those titles come from years when the total  number of games released could be measured in the hundreds. What about now, when Steam sees  almost a thousand releases per month, when itch.

io gets untold hundreds a day? And many of those  games are far more fascinating than the Xbox 360 games that are about to disappear, but I think  about the raw volume of data we’re producing now, every moment more stuff to save and post and host  somewhere and it…it starts to stress me out. Look, just a few minutes ago I was talking  about how cool it’d be to have a version history of games in development, so we could  see where the cool decision points were made, but here’s the flip of that.

I used to work at a  normal office-y job with a normal office-y local storage network. And whenever we made an internal  powerpoint or public post or weekly meeting document, we’d save it as a new copy, so we had  a comprehensive version history. If you wanted to look at a powerpoint, you could see the original,  and then a separate version where someone had gone in and improved wording, and then a new one where  someone had found a better resolution photo and fixed some typos, and then– you get it.

This came  in handy more than once! Sometimes a person would “fix” something that didn’t actually need to  be fixed, sometimes a file would get corrupted, and hey, what do ya know– there was a  previous version we could hop back to. But the company was 20-plus years old, and had  been doing this for basically its whole existence, and I would sometimes click into an old folder by  mistake and find myself among a dozen different versions of the same document that hadn’t  been accessed since 2005.

Why hold onto all that stuff? Isn’t that just digital litter? I don’t want to overstate the problem here.

Text files and powerpoints like this take up very  little room, the company had like 18 employees, we weren’t running a server farm.  But because storage is so cheap, because it’s wayyy easier to just buy a few more  terabytes than sort back through 20 years of work, I do think it’s a little strange that  we’ve all been enabled to become like, digital hoarders. Right?

Is that an  inappropriate word for it? Where no matter how old or useless a file is, it’s simply  not worth the effort to throw it away? Sometimes I like to peruse the subreddit  r/datahoarders, which is devoted to this kind of thing.

Here’s someone who keeps 276  terabytes under their bed. Here’s a graph of a guy who transferred the better part of a  petabyte of research data over his university internet. Here’s a million people complaining  about how amazon delivered their hard drives.

And within all this, there’s a lot of cool  stuff. 14,000 PDFs of lego instructions, 39,000 separate electronic repair guides  from ifixit, a complete catalog of basically everything related to the January 6 riots  so no one can wipe it from the internet. But there’s also hundreds of people with  vast amounts of storage for god knows what (the most common joke is everyone is just storing  uhh… “adult entertainment”).

It seems like the place to go when you just have an overwhelming  anxiety about even a single byte being lost. Jorge Luis Borges has a one-paragraph short story  that details an unnamed empire absolutely consumed with the search for perfection in data. Any usable  map, for instance, was necessarily imperfect, because shrinking down the landmass onto a piece  of paper would require losing some of that land’s detail.

And so instead, the empire’s cartographers  created a map “whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it,” a  perfectly accurate creation that was perfectly useless because to examine it would require  traversing the same distances it charted. In the story, later generations let it  decay– its only remnants are in the desert, where tattered ruins of the map are  inhabited by “animals and beggars. ” The title of the story is “On  Exactitude in Science.

” It’s fun to think in these extremes. In 2020, PhD  physicist Melvin Vopson wrote a paper called “The Information Catastrophe,” in which he predicted  that, if the digital bits of information we produce on earth continues to grow at around  20% per year, in 350 years, “the number of bits produced will exceed the  number of all atoms on Earth. ” If that wasn’t enough, in merely 250 years the  “power required to sustain this digital production will exceed this much [18.

5 1012 Watts],  i. e. the total planetary power consumption today.

” And to cap it all off, in 500 years,  “the digital content will account for more than half of the Earth’s mass, according to the  mass-energy-information equivalence principle. ” It is not, personally, something I’m losing  too much sleep over– if we can make it to the point where “the information  catastrophe” poses a real threat, it’ll be because we’ve overcome some other much  closer catastrophes. But Vopson’s projection is absolutely Borges-like in its scale, the  mass of the Earth overwhelmed with the digital memory of everything everyone has  ever experienced and chosen to save.

Last year, Simon Garfield published a non-fiction  book called “All the Knowledge in the World. ” It’s a more approachable subject than the  title might suggest. It’s a history of the encyclopedia.

Although Garfield’s book is  a mere 400 pages, it paints a picture of how encyclopedias, at more than one time  in history, have aspired to gather…all the knowledge in the world. For instance: in the  year 1400 in China’s Ming Dynasty, the Yongle Emperor Zhu Di commissioned an encyclopedia  of near-incomprehensible scale. Thousands of scholars wrote a total of 11,000 volumes each  an inch or two thick, covering 23,000 chapters, an equivalent of 250 million words, six times  larger than the entire encyclopedia britannica.

Each volume bound in yellow damask silk, the  compiled collection takes up 1400 cubic feet. Or rather, it did. That particular version  of All the World’s Knowledge has disappeared over the centuries, lost to fire, war,  colonialism.

Just over 400 of the original 11,000 volumes still exist, spread across  the world in various libraries and private collections. It was called the Yongle  Da Dian, or the Yongle Encyclopedia. If you want an encyclopedia that’s  more comprehensively titled, may I suggest instead checking out the  German “Great Complete Encyclopedia of All Sciences and Arts,” which was originally  published under the more ambitious name: Great Complete Encyclopedia of All Sciences and  Arts Which So Far Have Been Invented and Improved by Human Mind and Wit: Including the Geographical  and Political Description of the Whole World with All Monarchies, Empires, Kingdoms, Principalities,  Republics, Free Sovereignties, Countries, Towns, Sea Harbors, Fortresses, Castles, Areas,  Authorities, Monasteries, Mountains, Passes, Woods, Seas, Lakes .

. . and also a Detailed  Historical and Genealogical Description of the World's Brightest and Most Famous Family  Lines, the Life and Deeds of the Emperors, Kings, Electors and Princes, Great Heroes,  Ministers of State, War Leaders.

. . ; Equally about All Policies of State, War and Law and  Budgetary Business of the Nobility and the Bourgeois, Merchants, Traders, Arts.

Hello– Jacob from the future here. With further research, it appears that most English  versions of this title, including the one printed in Garfield’s book, actually abridge over half  the words. In the pursuit of greatest accuracy, here’s the full unabridged title in its original  language.

Enjoy it, you freaking nerds. What’s fascinating about each encyclopedia, no  matter how many million words, is that they do necessarily fail in their task. No matter how many  thousands of authors contributed from how many countries, most of everything would inevitably  be left out.

And now, for many old encyclopedias, their historical value lies not in what they got  right but their specific inaccuracies. Garfield’s book makes the case that each encyclopedia is  a compelling and culturally valuable object, not because any of them actually achieved their  goal of gathering all the knowledge in the world, but because their successes and failures,  their preoccupations and prejudices, provide invaluable insight into the world they were first  published. Through the history of encyclopedias, he paints a picture of how knowledge was  gathered, stored, and sold to the public.

Why am I talking about enyclopedias? Because, for  my whole life, I would visit my grandma and see a shelf, a large shelf, with a massive  set of Encyclopedia Britannicas on it, a set that my grandpa got at a yard sale because  “who would throw out an encyclopedia? ” I recently learned that behind that set of Britannicas was  in fact another set of encyclopedias, a beautiful set of 1968 world books in off-white and green  that my father read cover to cover as a kid.

I have to imagine that neither  set had been touched in…25 years, at least? But there they sat,  probably 300 pounds, two layers thick of all the knowledge that could be contained  in thousands upon thousands of pages. Of course, the punchline to my grandparent’s  collection, the punchline patiently waiting through all of Simon Garfield’s discussion  of previous centuries is that now, in the 21st century, we kind of have a repository  of all knowledge available to us, weightlessly, instantly.

Wikipedia is far larger, has far more  words and entries, than even an emperor could have assembled. And each article is, then, linked to  even MORE comprehensive sources on each topic, a monumental collection of knowledge, still  flawed, still incomplete, but somehow existing. Did you know you can download it?

Per Wikipedia  itself, a text-only download of just the current pages would run you less than 25gb of  space. Not a shelf double-stacked full, not even a flash drive. Less than the storage  requirements of Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance for the abridged version of all human knowledge. 

If you wanted to get the media too, all the pictures and videos and audio files used across  wikipedia, it’d run you a slightly heftier uhh, 428 terabytes. Still probably lighter  than my grandparent’s bookshelf. Maybe most interesting to a researcher like Simon  Garfield is the downloadable page history for each entry, the forum discussions, every version  of every article, the evolution of knowledge and framing over time.

It’s like a million  editions of an encyclopedia in one database. Here’s the next question. How long will  it last?

That World Book my dad read is 55 years old. The Yongle Encyclopedia, with  only two copies ever made, disappeared over the course of 600 years. Wikipedia at present  is 22 years old.

We can keep it, store it, on flash drives and cloud storage and NAS arrays  kept under the bed. Will that last for longer? The Internet Archive is essentially the dream  of the data hoarder, a library of everything kept forever.

The Wayback Machine is one  of the projects of the Internet Archive, a tool that saves previous versions of websites.  It’s a tool I use for research constantly because there are vanishingly few outlets that have  any interest in preserving their own history. The larger part of the archive is 41 million  books and texts, 14 million audio recordings, 8 and a half million videos, 4 and a half  million images, and just under a million software programs.

3 years ago, one of  the archives staff guessed it had about 70 petabytes of stuff in storage, not the biggest  storage operation on the planet but certainly one of the biggest public efforts to save all the  knowledge, art, everything, in the world. It has historically been far more accessible  than any similar pursuit, so much so that all the recent stories about the archive have focused  on the attempts to dismantle it. But it does also raise an interesting question about the difference  between a library and an archive, a collection and a hoard.

Years ago I talked about the criteria  libraries used to determine what they kept on shelves, how the goal was not to simply have  Every Book Ever Written available for checkout. Librarians prune their shelves, get rid of books,  replace them, keep things updated. But the goal of the internet archive is exactly that, every  book, page, thing ever written.

It’s a dizzying technological achievement to be able to store  the volume of content the Internet Archive does, an impossible gift to researchers and historians.  It’s also giving information catastrophe, a little bit. Is it not?

How many billions of  bytes are stored to give me the privilege of seeing what the website for Cookout looked like  at 458 different points in time? But then, what if we can’t? What if one of the many lawsuits against  the archive succeeds in stripping it for parts?

The bizarre contradiction of our digital age is  that we are empowered, encouraged even, to save everything, buy more storage on google drive,  back up your whole computer. And yet, how far does our possession of that data actually extend?  As unstable as our physical world is, the internet might be more so– in an article by Daniel Greene  entitled “Landlords of the Internet,” he dissects how our online spaces are predominantly owned by  what are essentially real estate firms, companies like Equinix and Digital Realty.

These corps  are, in square footage, far larger than Google or Facebook, and they hold the infrastructure that  keeps the internet running. We are all essentially renting our online existence from these invisible  companies and– like any property rental– that means we’re subject to being screwed over by  our landlords at any given time. The internet does not exist in a democratized cloud, it  exists as massive for-profit infrastructure, infrastructure that even the most noble  pursuits are necessarily built on top of.

And it’s with this in mind that I return to those  two layers of encyclopedias on my grandma’s shelf. They are not trash, not to her, even though  the volumes might be too unwieldy for her to actually open anymore. She worries about  the idea of replacing this massive physical proof of accumulated knowledge with  the uneasy omnipotence of the internet.

Though I doubt she knows any more about the  physical wires and corporations than the rest of us, she probably also suspects it could  disappear like so many yellow silk-bound volumes, and then by god, we’d all be fortunate to have a  shelf full of two collections of everything. It’s hard to fault her for this. One of my little  pet theories is that the re-popularization of vinyl as a format amongst young people isn’t  just a nostalgic throwback, but one of the few ways we can actually own the media we  like in a format that can’t be taken away.

No matter how much money I’ve paid spotify  over the years, nothing I can do will prevent it from just vanishing one day, taking that  infinite library of music with it. “Buying” a movie on Amazon or Itunes is only good until  they decide to stop hosting it, streaming has no obligation to keep what you enjoy in stock.  A vinyl album, for as big and clunky as it is, will play the songs I enjoy as long as  record players still have needles.

Have you ever heard of Marion Stokes? It’d  be understandable if not. As a young adult, she was an activist, librarian, producer of a  local TV show.

None of these are particularly notable. But in 1977, Marion Stokes started  taping what was being shown on the news, and she simply did not stop. 24 hours a day,  no breaks, no holidays.

As cable news grew, so did the scale of her recording,  capturing up to 8 channels at a time, still– exclusively– on VHS tapes. She did  this for 35 years straight. The collection, 70,000 tapes long, ended only at her death,  December 14, 2012.

That day’s breaking news, the last moments captured, is the  Newtown Elementary School shooting. What is the difference between a  collection and a hoard? To Stokes, the purpose of her project was the preservation  of facts, an indisputable archive of how stories were told and framed and changed over time.

As a  young activist, she was surveilled by the CIA– as an obsessive observer of media, she saw the way  stories were presented to sculpt a particular reaction. And her reaction was to document  everything, as comprehensively as she knew how. Let’s skip to the end of the story, briefly.

After  her death, her son donated the collection to, who else, the internet archive. Roger Macdonald,  head of the television section of the archive, said the collection is absolutely  unprecedented, heroic. Even the television stations that originally aired this stuff had  long-since recorded over many of their tapes; the level of history Stokes preserved for  the world is almost indescribable.

Now let’s jump back to the middle of the process.  Stokes, while recording, had no idea what she was going to do with the tapes. Her son described her  as owning 40, 50 thousand books.

He said she read 11 newspapers a day and never threw any of them  away. Nor would she throw away…anything else. She was an intense person, what the people around  her politely referred to as “dogmatic.

” She lived estranged from her son for many years, had  no time for other family members. I mean…she was a woman who ran 8 tape recorders  at a time for 35 years. If you heard about a person like that, would your  first response be “what a hero”?

In the documentary, other people remark that  the difference between a collection and a hoard is the value that someone else can find in  it. The 70,000 tapes Stokes recorded without ever having a plan for what she would do with  them? An invaluable collection.

The dozens of diner-style syrup containers kept in garbage bags  in rooms she never entered? Obviously a hoard. Except those lines can only be cleanly drawn  in retrospect.

If the internet archive didn’t exist to digitize the tapes, if for some reason we  found an incredible use for syrup containers…you see what I’m saying. To break…the illusion of professionalism, or whatever. The topic of this video has somehow  become the exact challenge of this script.

I have read so many different things for this, there are  so many different aspects that could go into the video, but they can’t ALL fit. What does ownership  really mean, what’s the emotional cost of holding onto everything, what’s the environmental cost  of keeping everything digitally preserved. Some common writing advice is just “kill your  darlings;” that is, even your favorite individual bit of writing might be holding back the piece  as a whole.

Effective writing is figuring out what to throw away as much as what to keep.  And I think I’m generally pretty good at that, I don’t make 3 hour videos. But here  I just keep trying to cram everything into a script that can’t support it, and now I  feel trapped by all the stuff I collected.

I’ve been thinking about my Grandma again.  Because it’s not just encyclopedias in her house. They sit framed by thousands of other  books, and those books live alongside dozens and dozens of genuinely beautiful pieces of art,  countless CDs and vinyls, music and spoken word,, a collection of ornate beer steins, clothes  from my dad’s siblings that haven’t been worn in decades, old handbags, dolls, empty cardboard  boxes in case anything needs to be packaged… Often when I come home from a visit, I have  this overwhelming urge to get rid of stuff, to make sure that my drawers only  contain things that I actually use, to stave off the potential of that sort of  “collection.

” In fear, I veer towards minimalism. But there are still things I keep. I excuse  some of my vinyl, some of my local data storage, because I’m so skeptical of the continued  accessibility of our online structure.

I think, “well it’s reasonable to want to keep that. ”  My grandma, born Jewish in France in 1935, has…better reasons to be skeptical. She has  experienced everything being taken from her, her home, her friends, her parents.

She is part  of a generation told they could have nothing, keep nothing, maintain ownership  over not even their lives. Art Spiegelman’s Maus, a set of two graphic novels  illustrating his father’s experiences in Poland during the war, are most commonly deployed– at  least they were to me– as a way of learning about the horrors of the holocaust. And they are,  certainly, that.

Spiegelman’s dad, Vladek, was conscripted, separated from his wife, held at  Auschwitz, stuffed into train cars with hundreds of the sick and dying. It is, appropriately,  dreadful. But getting older and rereading Maus, I find myself more and more attached to the  parts I skimmed as a kid, the sections of the story that take place in the present.

These  depict Spiegelman’s experiences with his now 70-year old father, taking place in kitchens  and cars and walks around the neighborhood. And instead of the drama and horrors  of concentration camps and mass graves, Vladek complains about his new wife and his  aging body and how much his son paid for a tape recorder. It all feels incredibly low stakes when  compared to the bits taking place during the war.

But they are, I’ve increasingly recognized, just  as necessary to the story Maus is telling. The first of the two books is named “My Father  Bleeds History. ” It’s a title that not only implies the breadth of Vladek’s experience, but  the fact that the history is now a part of him, it is bound to his DNA, it has changed the shape  of who he is.

And it’s with this in mind that I read Spiegelman’s descriptions of his father’s  home. Bookshelves with piles of stationary from a hotel he once stayed at, four 1965 calendars  from a bank he didn’t have an account with, water pitchers from old hospital stays, hoarded matches  he can get for free from businesses. Vladek holds onto a box of Special K, a cereal he would never  even eat (“it has salt and also sugar, for me it’s poison”), because he can’t stand the idea of  throwing any food away.

Art Spiegelman wonders aloud in the book if his characterization of  Vladek is playing into stereotypes of the miserly old Jew. In reality, the portrait he paints is  one of a very specific trauma, reflections of times Vladek survived only because he had the  presence of mind to save something for later. It’s the major source of tension between  father and son in the book.

Art desperately wants to learn and write his dad’s story– but he  is constantly frustrated by his father’s behavior, behavior we can see the origins  of in the history he bleeds. And ironically, Art’s greatest  anger at Vladek doesn’t come from something he’s hoarded but one of  the only things he’s thrown away: his late wife’s journals, in which she recorded  her experience in the camps, years before she would eventually kill herself. Vladek says  they held too many memories– he burned them.

Art yells at him, “god damn you, you murderer,  how the hell could you do such a thing? ” How can we bear to throw anything away? Except.

I called my grandma a little  while ago, to see if she could tell me the exact edition of her encyclopedias, only  to learn that she had actually given them away, all of them, both layers in the bookshelf. Last  time I was there, we helped her throw out two dozen old VHS tapes of movies she hadn’t watched  this millennium. We found, behind those tapes, my grandpa’s medals from World War 2, artifacts  that had been long-hidden under piles of like, Caddyshack 2.

A hoard obscuring  actual sentimentality. It is too cliche to end this with some  broad statement about how “actual value comes from the memories we have attached  to items, not the items themselves. ” That’s true, sure.

But it’s overly simplistic,  ignores the way history shapes our emotional connection to any item, ignores the way that  history itself is sometimes only preserved thanks to obsessive efforts by individuals. It  can’t solve how much stuff we might attach our emotions to, when that attachment overrules  our ability to connect to other people, when the weight of all that stuff is too great  to drag into the future. I can talk all I want, cite as many sources as I can, I still  don’t have the answer to that.

As I’ve been writing this, a process that’s taken  much longer than many of my other scripts, I keep thinking about…Katamari Damacy. You know, the 2004  video game. Your only job, as the five centimeter tall “prince of the cosmos,” is to roll up  everything into a massive collection.

Thumbtacks, pennies, candies, cassette tapes, glue, flowers,  golf balls, plants, birds, cereal boxes, every version of video games, computers, encyclopedias,  benches, people, cars, trees, buildings, clouds, continents. Everything on earth rolled up,  preserved, contextualized alongside every other object, a giant spinning record of anything anyone  could ever wish to remember. You gather it all, present it to the king of the cosmos.

He tells you  it’s fine, a little disappointing. He throws it up into the sky. It becomes a star.

I feel like I have to start this sponsor read  with an apology, or at least an explanation. Because every other time I’ve been sponsored  by Henson Razors I’ve done something completely absurd with my facial hair, to the extent that it  feels like a disappointment if I don’t. HOWEVER, in about a week, I’m going to be doing a  24-hour charity stream that ALSO inevitably includes donations for me to mangle my beard,  and if I humiliate myself NOW for this sponsor, it means I can’t humiliate myself in a week  for charity.

Being a youtuber is so hard. But that notwithstanding, this is kind of the  perfect video for Henson to sponsor. Because what they sell is this, this extremely  well-designed and built safety razor.

You order it, you receive it in the mail,  that’s it. No recurring subscription, no monthly boxes. Just this razor, which you very  easily could use for the rest of your life.

But why would you want to do that? Well,  here’s a good reason: the longer you use it, the “cheaper” it gets. This thing does cost  more than some random razor you’d find at the grocery store, it’s true.

BUT, it’s a safety  razor, meaning it uses actual razor blades, so instead of paying at least $20  for a pack of cartridges, you can pay like…$10 for a pack of a HUNDRED blades. This is  one of those “good investments” people are always saying you should make. You can actually get 100  blades for free even, more on that later.

The other reason to buy one, of course, is that  it gives a really nice shave. I could extend this read by another couple minutes to tell  you about how they’re precision-engineered, how there’s no real learning curve to using one,  how it just feels nice to shave with something that’s so clearly high quality. Probably the  most meaningful recommendation I can give though, is that next Sunday, after doing god-knows-what  to my face for charity, shaving with this will be a little treat to my sleep-deprived self, a  moment of meditation to become a human again.

You can get one, a Henson razor and maybe a  moment of meditation, however you want. BUT, if you use my link in the description, you can  add a box of 100 blades to your order and those blades will be completely free. Go ahead, buy  a razor you’ll never have to throw away.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to planning  how I’m going to absolutely f**k up my beard.