Yes, I have. There are already stacks of cardboard boxes filled with books. For everything that comes into the house, something must leave. Better if several things leave, so that I can once again have empty space and uncluttered surfaces.
I scanned all my old photographs and threw out the originals. I'm doing the same with my audio and video cassettes, after which I can get rid of the cassette deck and VCR. I might get rid of the television, as my computer can do everything I need a TV for. (I haven't watched broadcast television in years.)
Move to a bigger house? If I could afford to, I would. But that would just put off the problem for a while, and lack of storage space isn't even the main problem. The real problem is that stuff takes not just physical space, but mental space. Those old photographs are now organised by date and location in a folder on my hard disc, where I don't have to see them. I know exactly where they are if I need to find one, but they aren't a drain on my mental energy the way the boxes full of 3,000 pictures were. I have umpteen mid-ranking SF novels that I dump as fast as I read them, because a few notes in a bibliography file to remind me what was in them is all I want to keep.
I have no ambition to live with fewer than 100 things, but I live and work best in a clean and uncluttered environment, and looking round my computer room right now, that is not what I have.
I have a problem with developing attachments to the books, movies, games, and other media that I enjoy. For example, after I finished playing the new Prince of Persia title via rental, I enjoyed it so much that I went out and bought my own copy, even though I knew I would be unlikely to play the game again for at least a year.
This is wasteful in a lot of ways. The media takes up unnecessary space, and makes moving from one place to another more difficult; the last time I moved, easily 3/4 the boxes contained media, primarily books which have especially low information-to-weight and information-to-volume ratios.
More importantly, my magpie habit uses up money, even though there are numerous free or inexpensive long-term rental services like NetFlix, GameFly, and my old favorite the US public library system.
I've decided to get around this by trying to transfer my sense of ownership from the item itself to the memory of the experience of enjoying it. So, I've been writing up reviews of all the games, movies, and books that I own, and also all those that I can remember enjoying in the past even if I don't currently own them. I want this "collection" to feel complete, so that I'm not tempted to go and spend $40 on some old SNES cartridge for the sake of posterity, or to buy any more books that I'm not actually expecting to read often enough or on short notice enough to offset the tiny cost of going down to the library and checking it out when needed.
I've been trying to look around for some computer application or net service that can help me do this, but to my surprise, pickings have been pretty slim! The only one that seems vaguely close is blippr, which exhibits a number of good ideas:
These things are all great, but unfortunately blippr is badly marred by poor responsiveness and a terrible user interface design. It also seems as though development on it has effectively halted for the last year or so, and the source is unfortunately not available for me to contribute improvements myself. I've managed to review a couple hundred items anyways, but it took much longer than it should have, and I'm losing patience with its quirks fairly quickly.
My questions for y'all are: