Without the hot takes, let's have a long-form discussion about disc rot and why it's not going to destroy your games and movies on the shelf. Note that that Twin Snakes picture going around is an extreme example of top label damage, not disc rot, and likely still works fine. I have a background in hardware and lost/rare media preservation (analog & optical) and I'm a tech for one of the largest retro game stores in the country. The superstore location sees approximately a thousand tested disc-based games move through it every month, and over the course of an entire year, there is a single digit number of examples of games with any signs of "rot", edge corrosion, or pinholing combined. The very few discs that do have problems tend to be the same games. This is because "disc rot" is caused by defective or inconsistent adhesive allowing oxygen, sulfur, and other chemicals to permeate and react with the reflective aluminum layer of the disc. This oxide reaction mixed with the adhesive compounds can dull or attack that layer, which results in bad data reads due to the lack of reflectivity. This can often be repaired, but that's probably best saved for another post. Many early CDs & Laserdiscs (DiscoVision), and later defective DVDs had issues with edge sealing and lifting adhesive, which is where this was first noticed. Outside of those known cases, almost all of your retro optical media will never have any issues, because manufacturing methods solved the adhesive sealing issues quickly. They knew it was a problem by the mid 80s, and production quickly standardized. And yes, the fear around "disc rot" is not entirely organic. Much of it is hysteria seeded by garbage journalism. Also, after failing to achieve their "all digital" goals in the mid-2010s, companies pushed this concept via online consensus cracking, because they are determined to completely phase out media ownership in lieu of streaming and cloud-based gaming, as digital-only streamed games present significant preservation problems. They need you to distrust and abandon the critical value of physical media ownership, so don't fall for it. Finally, none of what I'm outlining here precludes you from backing up your cartridges, tapes, and discs. Multiple methods of preservation are great, and in the case of rare or lost media, required. You can, however, relax knowing that the vast majority of common discs will be fine for multiple lifetimes, especially if cared for properly. The evidence is just not there for optical media mass extinction, despite some people being weirdly emotionally tied to that outcome. Emulation, FPGA, and ISO/ROM custody are all great tools, but physical media must survive, because without it, preserving anything becomes vastly more difficult.💿