A Stickies Situation

Netflix is great, but has one serious limitation for someone like me: a 500 DVD queue limit. For most people, the ability to line up 500 discs to watch is beyond adequate. There are many flavors of geek I am, but ”film geek” isn't one of them—not yet. For years I've listened to “You would LOVE ______!” or “Have you seen _______?” or the blatant, “I can't BE-lieve you haven't seen _______!” Within days of joining Netflix back in June I had about 300 discs reserved; within weeks I hit the limit of 500.

As of today I've rated 868 discs on their site. Even though this factors in all the movies I've seen in my lifetime as well as the hundred or so I've rented from them, it's still a relatively small number in the grand scheme of things. I'm ashamed to admit that last year was the first time I saw Citizen Kane, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Flight of the Navigator, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The older titles are somewhat understandable, but it's a mystery how some of the big Sci Fi movies slipped through the cracks. Granted, I was three when Close Encounters came out and it took a lot of effort to get my parents to take me to see E.T., and then only after we went to see Annie. My mom loved that movie. I years later developed a crush on a girl with the same name who played the lead in a middle school play. But that day, when I sat there angry that we weren't seeing my movie, and a commercial for Reeses Pieces came on with E.T. before the movie started, falsely raising my hopes that my parents had pranked me and had not in fact dragged me to see an orphan girl, I was beyond consolable. They had to cave and see my movie on our next outing. I think I was still making them feel guilty when I dragged them to see Gremlins a few years later.

It's understandable in my youth, with the limitations a child must necessarily have, that I would not see some of these movies. We've never had cable, so that too limited my opportunity to catch up. By the time we had a VCR, the list had grown unmanageable, and impossible to catch up in mom'n'pop video stores with limited selections. I probably made some poor choices as a teenager, but darn it Navy Seals was cool! “Strike Like Lightning!” I'd like to blame Cabin Boy on teenage stupidity as well, but I'm currently staring at the date “1994” in disbelief. I would have been 20 years old, 19 at the youngest, and in college either way. I could swear I was still in high school then. Who did I see that with? What was wrong with us?

Clearly misjudgments have been made and errors need to be rectified. I used to have a lot of long conversations with my ex-girlfriend about the movies I hadn't seen, or she hadn't seen, or our mutual viewing vacancies. After seeing a movie in the theater we'd often rent 2 or 3 more and snuggle up on the couch back at home. Back then I was keeping up with new movies, sometimes seeing 2 a week, and slowly catching up on older ones. Thanks to her, I even kept up with less mainstream independent works. I'm on a quest now to finish what was started, and restore culture to my limited cinematic experiences. So when I first hit the wall of 500, I naturally started manually listing movies in Stickies. Any time someone would recommend something to me at work I'd e-mail myself at home to add it on my harddrive's list, and to my queue when space opened up. Any time I rented something and liked one or more of the trailers, I added it. Once I'd see something I'd delete it from the Stickies file. So last night after watching American History X, I opened the Stickies application to delete it from the list. For some reason I selected the entire list of 86 films and then, even worse, hit the letter “a”. I stared dumbfounded as the list was replaced by one letter, and quickly hit Command+Z to undo.

Nothing happened. I didn't panic though; I simply quit the application. I hadn't hit Command+S to save, so logically it would revert. Yet when there was no message asking if I was SURE I wanted to quit without saving, I had a bad feeling. Upon relaunching, there was that lowercase “a” mocking me. It wasn't uppercase or scarlet, but there may have been some mental self-flagellation going on at the time. I searched futilely online for ways to recover my lost information, but alas, it was gone. About two or three years ago I chuckled silently overhearing how my supervisor lost all her important phone numbers because the tech guys closed her Stickies when they worked on her machine. I couldn't believe someone could be so foolish as to store data in such a temporary medium.

I couldn't possibly remember all the movies that were on that overflow list. I tried to recreate it while watching Sky Captain tonight, partly from memory and partly by going page by page through Netflix' list of recommendations. That list is back up to 72, but I think the majority are new additions that weren't there before. I've made the same mistakes far more than twice, but in this instance my new list is in a more stable text file. A physical post-it probably would have been more stable than what I did. I could have avoided this whole mess of course if the limit wasn't 500, but then even the best services must have some drawbacks.