Dad’s Denouement, Part 8: The Benefits of Abandonment
By: Political Math
Tags: Death, Short Story, Dads, Plex

As a point of pride, I don’t give up on things. I see every project through, no matter how meaningless, how small, how stupid, how useless. Giving up was a signal to me that I couldn’t do it and, goddamn it, I can do anything.

But some things simply are not worth doing. Proving that I can do this thing, build this thing that almost no one will use, this might be important, but it’s not more important than the time I have. That time is limited and it’s running out. At the end of the day… at the literal end… was that time trade-off worth it?

I want to end here because this is a sad place to end and I’m very sad. But I want to share where I am spending my time.

I spend a lot of time curating my media library in Plex. Plex is a home media service that allows you to take your movies and TV shows and stream them from a home server to devices within your home network or remotely to your friends. If that sentence sounded overly complicated, don’t bother, Plex isn’t for you. But it is for me.

My obsession with Plex developed in part because of my frustration with Netflix. Netflix is a place where I can watch whatever I want until suddenly I can’t. Shows or movies disappear without warning from Netflix. It bothers me a little bit but it bothers my kids a lot. They would be in the middle of watching a show or have a favorite movie and it would suddenly disappear. I really worry about a generation whose only experience with media is in subscribing to a service, never having media permanence., so I buy my media as DVDs and BluRays and I put them up on Plex. My kids know that, once it is on Plex, we have it forever.

Except that we won’t. I don’t know how long Plex will exist and, even if it turns into a 50–100 year company, the home media server needs to be maintained. There is a process for updating it, for keeping it running, for backing up and restoring the files. I spend a lot of time on something that will pretty quickly disappear the moment I do. That didn’t bother me before Dad died, but it eats at my mind now, corroding every accomplishment I make.

But I feel like bringing media stability for my kids is something worthwhile. They won’t have our movies forever, but maybe I can just keep this up until they can figure it out for themselves.

Maybe that’s what parents are for… to hold the world together just long enough for our kids to figure it out for themselves. I guess that is what my dad did, but I want to keep it up for him now that he’s gone. I can see the horizon of mortality inching closer and I have very little hope that my kids will want to maintain my projects and my data the way I try to maintain Dad’s. I want to think someone will care for and invest in the things I leave behind, but who really ever gets that?

I’ve spent hours and hours ripping and filtering old Looney Tunes and Disney shorts so that they can be streamed on Plex. It’s an almost overwhelming job to rip, encode, and rename all these files, but I’ve figured out a good way to do it and then I’ve shared the code to do that on github.

That brings me joy. There are maybe a couple hundred people in the world who care about this and I hope they find my work and improve on it. I get an occasional email pointing out an error I’ve made and it’s the best email I can get. Someone found me helpful and they’re using my work to help themselves and (hopefully) their family discover the things I love.

Even outside that projection of my work to other people, I would still obsess over my Plex library. It’s for my kids. They use it all the time, they’re used to it, they love it. It’s a quiet connection I make to them, a part of their childhood, a part of their lives. They may never understand the work that I put in to making sure they could always watch their favorite movies and TV shows. But quietly making things better for them feels like the only worthwhile investment.