VHS tapes in a box in the basement

[not that clay]

Is there a trick to getting rid of them? I can't bring myself to just throw them out. I even had a little flooding in the basement but it wasn't enough to get them. I'm thinking about hiring a hitman to do it for me.

[daveB from Oakland]

Digitize? Also, they can come in handy for scraping frost off a windshield.

[casualobserver]

story of my adult life

[cavorting with nudists]

Let's approach this rationally.

Movies on VHS or personally recorded stuff?

[not that clay]

Zero home movies. Mostly Letterman from the mid-1980s and Hodgson-era MST3K. It's been almost 20 years since I've played any of them.

[not that clay]

It's only one and a half boxes. I can just keep that, right? It's not that bad.

[Bryan]

Yeah, you should probably hang on to those.

[cavorting with nudists]

I would say the length of time since you last watched them is more of a reason to keep them, not less, because the greater the time gap between capturing them and viewing them, the greater the charge they will carry--of nostalgia, historical interest, or just sheer weirdness of cultural displacement--when they finally are revisited.

Bottom line: Let your heirs deal with it.

[nec13]

Zero home movies. Mostly Letterman from the mid-1980s and Hodgson-era MST3K. It's been almost 20 years since I've played any of them.

You should definitely keep those Letterman tapes, because there's ZERO chance that any of those episodes will make it to DVD.

There are places that do VHS to DVD conversions. It's not cheap, but if you value having that extra space in your home, it's something you may want to consider.