I’ve given money to both charities and people. Here’s the thing about donating, though: you’ll get on all sorts of mailing lists and shit, and you’ll get lots more begging letters, emails, phone calls and texts. You know those PBS/NPR donation drives, where they’re like “We just need ten more donors this hour, it doesn’t matter how much!” or those charities that send you pre-printed labels and say “Hey, just send us five bucks, that’s all we need”? Yeah, they’re harvesting your information. If you even send them a penny, they’ll be back for more, and they’ll sell or trade your information to other charities.
I give money to our local volunteer fire/ems department every year, but I don’t use their pre-printed mailer; I hand them cash when Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny come through on their trucks. I have one of those pre-paid Visa gift cards that aren’t tied to an actual person; if I do an online donation, I’ll use that and give them fake information. The money is legit, the information is good enough to pass, but they can’t come harass me for more.
This includes all donations, by the way - political, religious, civic, charity, social, whatever. Do it in cash or by an anonymous Visa gift card.
GenX tv addict here. I grew up in a time when, if you wanted to watch a show, you need to make an effort to be in front of the tv when it aired. If you missed seeing it, you had to hope that if was repeated over the summer (only about 2/3’s the episodes of a continuing series would be repeated, and if a show was cancelled, that was it). If you missed it on summer repeats, you’d have to hold the show went into syndication, was carried locally at a time you were able to watch it, and then stalk the series because syndication packages were notoriously shown out of order (which is why almost all the episodes ended up with the characters being in the same base situation as they started out in).
It was the same thing if there was an episode or series you loved and wanted to watch again.
VCRs were an absolute game changer. You didn’t have to revolve your life around a tv schedule- you could go out, to go events, go shopping, have a late dinner. You could pause tv to go to the bathroom, you could watch and re-watch episodes that you enjoyed, or verify something you thought had happened earlier instead of relying on collective memory. If you missed taping something, you might still have to wait for re-runs - but there was also the chance that someone else had taped it and could loan you the tape.
Having learned the lessons of broadcast tv, I taped everything I watched, and I kept the tapes of the stuff I liked, or that had actors I liked. I could sit down today and watch all the episodes of David Soul in Casablanca or Billy Campbell in Moon Over Miami, or short-lived shows like Space Rangers or South of Sunset.
I still record and save things locally. The myth of having immediate access to everything ever produced was always just a myth.