In my last "Regrets of a Datahoarder" post, I lamented not downloading Hey Arnold! and The Joy of Painting when I had the chance. Well, it so happens that, through a series of incredibly unlikely and rather expensive events, I now have access to Hey Arnold again and I'm making the most of that chance. I'm totally done with series 1 and 2, and I'm part the way through series 3 at this stage, so we have no more regrets there.
The Joy of Painting is still a bit of a stumbling block. Fortunately, since Cobalt regained the ability to download and remux from Youtube, I can technically carry on with that, it's just there's so fricken much! 31 series, each having 13 episodes, that's 403 episodes! I already have everything from series 1-6 and most of series 7, but there's still so much there to download 1 episode at a time. Does Cobalt have a queue? THat would make things easier (not by much though). I'm still kicking myself over missing my chance to download that show from the Internet Archive when I had the chance back in 2015. It's like... not to put too fine a point on it, Tina, but that was 10 gotdamn years ago. Forgive yourself and move on, girl!
I also missed my chance to download Stargate SG-1 from the Archive. For about 2 months, from July to September, SG-1 was available under the collection name "SGC all" from the Internet Archive's Unsorted Video collection. I looked at it, but I couldn't decide if this was another wasteful 1080p genAI upscale job. I guess I wasn't paying attention. The only thing I really paid attention to was the aspect ratio, and since it filled the screen, I figured it had been messed around with, so I rejected it. Well, I found it again on a streaming website (in English this time) and discovered that, hey! It was originally filmed in 16:9! I didn't know this, assumed things about it, and left it to be deleted by overzealous moderators.
Really, the Internet Archive has a serious genAI problem. About a quarter of all the complete programmes uploaded there have been passed through an AI upscaling process, which makes it unsuitable for archiving. I'm not interested in "new and improved", I want the original programme in its original showpiece condition. I can't tell you how many other shows I've passed up on there, some of which I've spent most of 20 years looking for again, just to see "AI generated 1080p upscale". Let's put it this way: my datahoard would rather have no Early Edition than a wasteful upscaled version of Early Edition.
The theme of the evening being "get it while you can", I decided that, since I can't go back in time and get those shows again, I can still get stuff onto my 3DS from the hShop. For the moment, hShop and its host are still there, so I decided to download all the DSiWare and 3DS games that I had ever owned or looked at and wondered about. After all, I've got a 32 gigabyte SD card in that thing and I'm only using slightly more than a quarter of the space. All 15+5 Essential 3DS games, sure, but also the stuff that I've heard about or seen longplays of, regardless of whether or not I'm going to play them. After all, isn't that the point of hoarding? To just have stuff? You don't think that Smaug went down to Escaroth and bought stuff with the gold in his hoard, do you? No, he sat on it for most of a century. "I will not part with a single coin, not one piece of it." I will not part with a single ROM, not one byte of it.
At the same time, I also decided to replace my entire stock of game ROMs. As I've come to discover lately, more than a few of them are totally corrupt. I mostly got them from No-Intro on the Internet Archive, so I'm looking into alternative databases to find replacements. That was really disappointing, though— plugging my flashdrive full of games into my laptop to play something on SNES or Mega Drive and finding that the ROM is corrupt. Plainly, most of your more common software pirates aren't autistic in any way, otherwise their hoards would be better curated.