Otaku Spring Cleanup 2014...

Recently, in the aftermath of the Attack Of The Mushroom People, and in the tradition of the Ultimate Otaku Fall Cleanup, I came to the realization that I had to reorganize the DVD collection. In all, I have about 4100 DVDs. It took several hours to unload the shelves in the center, shift everything over about a foot and reload the shelves.

After the initial phase of reorganization, I ended up losing space in the corner, where two banks of shelves intersect. I'm not entirely sure how to make use of that dead space in the corner, but, for the time being, I have some old magazines hidden in that space that are doing double duty as book ends.

Some of the DVDs (mostly anime) are hiding under the bed. Also, the bank of shelves in the center and on the right have two rows of DVDs. The center bank is where a good sized chunk of my anime is hidden (the important thing is that I know it's there) and the bank on the right conceals many of my DVD box sets.

To conserve additional space, I began a process of repackaging some DVDs that didn't have their original cases using thin (half-width) one-disc and two-disc DVD cases. A friend of my aunt's family passed away and left behind hundreds of DVDs. After my aunt and her family took their share, I got a share as well. In addition, I have a number of items recorded from TV. For DVDs that didn't have cover art, I scoured the web for suitable artwork and in most cases I found the actual front and back cover art. Sometimes, when suitable cover art was not available, I had to invent my own cover art using movie posters, book covers and publicity photos. With cover art in hand, I used a photo printer to print the inserts.

In a further effort to conserve space, there were several instances where I could consolidate multiple individual DVDs into a multiple-disc set. I picked up a bunch of clear three-disc, four-disc and six-disc boxes from my friendly neighborhood e-tailer. This treatment is usually reserved for some of the more obscure items like my collection of Nickelodeon animation. I re-used the original Nick Picks cover art and added in a number of my own recordings to the original sets. Likewise, I had some individual Ed, Edd and Eddy recordings that could be added to the official Ed, Edd and Eddy Season box sets. Then, there were a handful of older DVD sets where the original cases were either damaged or where the original cases (which were produced before there was an industry standard) were much wider than their more contemporary versions. In all, but, one instance I was able to re-use the original cover art. For the one exception, I was able to create a suitable insert for the case.

Years ago, during the anime boom of the '90s, it was common practice among distributors, to split a 13-episode series into three or four volumes or a 26 episode series into 6, 7 or 8 volumes. Although much of my anime is hidden from view, somehow I can't seem to bring myself to the extreme of repackaging my anime to save space.