I've been collecting movies since I was twelve years old. Call me materialistic, shallow or wasteful, but I'm pretty proud of the personality of my movie collection. In the mood for a comedy about rock and roll? Pop in This is Spinal Tap or Airheads. In the mood for a dramatic prison movie? The Shawshank Redemption or Cool Hand Luke is calling your name. Gangster flicks? Godfather, Goodfellas and Godfather II, in that order. I could go on and on devising clever sub-genres for my collection, but it'd be in my best interest to get to the point.

I collect movies in the medium we've all grown accustomed to: Digital Video Disc, or DVD for short. Mistakenly referred to as CDs by my grandparents ("Hey, Rich, throw in the Family Guy CDs"), these babies have taken over the business. Production studios don't have to worry anymore about box office failures because they know they'll get a good chunk of their money back through DVD sales and rentals (except in the case of Gigli and Son of the Mask...sometimes there just isn't hope).

Behind the scenes footage, director commentaries, deleted scenes and movie trailers make buying a movie nowadays so much more entertaining and exciting, at least if you're a movie geek like myself. So why would anyone who's the least bit intrigued by movies or television not have a DVD player?

I remember my grandparents' initial reluctance with the machine and the first DVD that I watched with them. I was excited as I pointed out to their virgin eyes the wonderful interactive menus.

"Look! You can access different scenes of the movie, you can go to special features, you can put on closed captioning and you can even watch the movie in Spanish!"

I could probably be described in that moment as a babbling idiot and I could tell because my grandparents' faces were unimpressed. They nodded and smiled but I could see in their faces that they were saying, "What's the big deal? Not so different from the VHS tapes."

I could never understand this line of reasoning from the elder generation. Why not embrace this new marvelous technology? Why not forget about rewinding and tracking those god-awful VHS tapes and instead invest in a DVD player that will last forever?

It seemed the general consensus of most elderly folk I came across was that this new DVD technology was a threat to the humble VHS tapes that housed such timeless classics as old reruns of All in the Family and Twin Peaks. I didn't understand it and wrote it off as some stubborn side effect of old age.

There's now a DVD player in my grandparents' living room and my grandpa watches old episodes of Newsradio and my grandma watches her Special Edition Inside Look at Jeopardy. They've adapted.

But as they adapted I realized now the reasoning behind their original stubbornness to assimilate. Like a ton of bricks, it hit me one day as I was on the Internet reading about the Playstation 3.

As Chuck Palahniuk once wrote, "Every generation wants to be the last."

It's true. I may only be 19 years old, but I'm now in the same position all those old people were in when they went into Sears one day and saw that they couldn't find a blasted VCR anywhere on the shelves.

The Playstation 3 costs $599.99. Pretty exorbitant of a price, if you ask me. What justifies this price tag and what does it have to do with DVDs?

Quite simply, the Playstation 3 is a "Blu-ray disc" player. That's right. Blu-ray. It's so new and innovative it doesn't even need an "e" on the end of "blue."

What is Blu-ray? According to Blu-ray.com the Blu-ray, also known as Blu-ray Disc (BD), is the name of a next-generation optical disc format. The format was developed to enable recording, rewriting and playback of high-definition video (HD), as well as storing large amounts of data. The format offers more than five times the storage capacity of traditional DVDs and can hold up to 25GB on a single-layer disc and 50GB on a dual-layer disc.

In case you don't know what any of that means, basically you can watch the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy (yes, all self-aggrandizing nine hours of it) with one single Blu-ray disc. This is great news for production companies: more expensive mediums for movies which means more profits for them.

What this means for us poor consumers is that the BD format is expected to replace the DVD very soon. According to said Web site, "The Blu-ray format has received broad support from the major movie studios as a successor to today's DVD format. The initial line-up is expected to consist of more than 100 titles..."

So not only are we going to have to shell out excessive amounts of dollars for Blu-Ray players, we'll also need to get a High Definition TV if we want to be able to view the ridiculously sharp picture quality that makes this new Blu-Ray format so prolific.

Call me just a little angry. I've spent seven years collecting more than 100 DVDs and now they want to pull the carpet out from underneath me and replace it with some modish new format that's going to cost me even more money? Call it karma, but now I understand why my Uncle Joe still collects VHS films and my grandparents gave me those unimpressed looks. Every generation wants to be the last.

My grandparents innately didn't want to accept the changes that were going on around them. It's not just them, though. No one does - even if it's as simple as your favorite Mom and Pops pizza shop going out of business because a Papa John's is moving in. No one wants to see a society and its unique features that they have invested so much time in be dismantled by some suits in a meeting room who have the next big item that'll make them rich and make us penniless.

Maybe being outdated is a hidden fear in all of us. Maybe at some point in our lives we want to all just slow down and enjoy what we have instead of looking for the next big thing.