Something my mom did with old T-shirts that my sisters and I acquired over the years was to cut out large squares with the logo inside, and stitch them together into a big T-shirt quilt. It was a pretty neat piece of memorabilia that you could leave out on the couch as a conversation starter and a blanket, etc. I’ve thought about keeping some shirts to do a similar thing, but of course you know how most “re-use eventually” projects turn out… you rarely end up going through with it and instead you have a cardboard box full of old shirts.

I suppose you could also cut out just the logos and stuff them in a photo album or scrapbook if you like the look on fabric. That’s a lot less space usage than a box o’ shirts (or worse – a drawer!), but… still more than a 3mp digital image.

—

Here was the comment I was going to leave on the TeleVideo TS803 but it got eaten by the spam filter:

“If you’re ever interested in more info about this machine (the TeleVideo TS803), you can read a little more about it at the Old Computer Museum: http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=1077
BTW is it sitting on your kitchen counter just for this photo, or was that its permanent home before you tossed it?”

To be honest, Mason nabbed one of the Star Wars posters; it’s in his room now. He also got a White Zombie poster.

I have no idea where the soup can poster came from (other than, you know, the Dollar General). Maybe a thrift store? I remember thinking it was really funny at the time. It’s also a really big poster, much larger than all the others.

It’s the same approach I’ve been taking for many years already prior to tossing out obsolete dust-collecting matter: give it one last glance, thought, viewing, listen, read, or flip-through as part of bidding the item/s a final farewell, and then take a few photos or scans of the item before it’s truly gone and buried.

As Earl Green so eloquently states, “If I somehow need the experience of seeing the physical thing in front of me, I can open a folder.”
Even storage space for those scans should be a non-issue but if, for some reason, it is — even that can be outsourced to numerous online services and shared with the rest of the world: Places like http://www.librarything.com or http://www.amazon.* (for books and other assorted media, see http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/pdp/profile/A2JLXINSYK7LPJ ), http://www.discogs.com (for music items), or even the wikipedia commons (old computer stuff) would gladly “host” your photographs — though I’m not sure if there’s a museum for old t-shirts. Failing that, there’s always http://www.flickr.com.

There are many ways your trash can live on as someone else’s treasure.

The only problem is that I’m gonna need a bigger hard drive to hold all the scans of the stuff. There’s always an achilles’ heel to the plan…