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I'm a Netflix habitue, but today I ran across references to a couple of other video-rental-by-mail service that might appeal. Nicheflix specializes in multi-region DVDs, including Asian and European films, anime, cult TV, and horror. And Facets Multimedia, a longstanding distributor and service provider for cinephiles, has a rental department.

On a completely different subject, I've been browsing through John December's Live Simple: Radical tactics to reduce the complexity, costs, and clutter of your life. It seems to come from almost exactly the perspective I'd like to have.

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Greencine always struck me as a much better company to support than Netflix -- they were a tiny bit cheaper, had a better selection of very-hard-to-find discs (though they were always out), and donate a proportion of their profits to film preservation. I was a member for a few months, until I realized that I don't enjoy watching movies.

Yeah, movies suck. I checked out Greencine at one point, but found that (a) although they clearly had a lot of movies that Netflix didn't, none of them seemed to be movies I wanted to rent, and (b) they didn't have the ability to enqueue movies that aren't yet available, which I use pretty heavily. So, oh well.

Greencine does have the best blog about movies ever in the history of the Internet, though, and if you don't agree with me, I swear I'm going to force you to watch Blake's Junction 7 until the end of time.

Uh, well, as far as I know, you're absolutely right! Although I do enjoy David Edelstein's quasi-blog column on Slate.

Reading that simplification book's free section reminded me that I haven't used the tape player sitting on the kitchen counter in a year or so. Into the closet it goes!

There's a not-free section?

Immediately placing that as item #45877345764576 on my list of things to do or read!

I've found Facets to be kind of costly and you have to return the films really fast.

It looks like they've gone to a Netflix-style no-late-fees system. Still costly though.

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