I came across a Cartrivision rewinder in a surplus store once. It was a simple device, with a motor, some limit switches, a key switch, and a counter. The counter tracked how many cartridges had been rewound, for billing purposes.
Other bad ideas of that era: Polaroid once developed a VHS cartridge with a mechanical counter of how many times it had been played. After some number of plays, the tape jammed.
In the early 80's, I modified a VHS cassette by placing a cylindrical high-strength magnet adjacent to the tape path on the takeup side. There was a nearly perfect pre-existing pocket in the case webbing to put the magnet with a dot of glue. The idea was to make a play-once, self-erasing cassette. Although not perfect, it was effective enough to really screw up the second playback. Probably screwed up the tape deck, too, but I don't recall any real evidence of that.
That was a common "self destruct" mechanism for VHSes issued by courts and other legal agencies for sharing decisions and reviewing certain evidence.
One of the VHS archiving communities I'm in found one in a sealed envelope at an estate sale, played it, and then started a thread describing the content and asking if anyone knew why they couldn't get it to play a second time.
Interesting. But was it ever developed commercially? I can't find any consumer products actually using the counter (either for rental or for lock/jam-after-certain-plays). But that could just be because I'm using the wrong search term - I imagine that there is a brand-specific term and searching "VHS tape play counter" isn't helpful since all the results are for either repairing VCRs, or for accessing the tape counter functionality in the VCR.
I have always wondered if it would be possible to build a generic reader for magnetic tapes that essentially just scans whatever tape you throw at it and then it is up to some software to decode the content. I know close to nothing about the details of magnetic recording on tape, so maybe this is just not possible with reasonable effort, i.e. you could but you would need SQUIDs to make it work or something like that.
You might be surprised at how the signals are actually recorded on tapes. For VHS tapes for example, it's actually a series of stacked "diagonal" lines of signal. Imagine a sequence of symbols like \\\\\\\\\\\, except at any given horizontal point along the tape there are about 5 stacked traces of signal. They're also diagonal on audio cassettes, but much less "slanted" relative to the tape's length.
I don't remember the precise terms for the various concepts, but hopefully that shows how specific to a given format the reader needs to be.
Audiotape is - or at least, Phillips compact cassettes are - recorded linearly. The recording method you're talking about for videotape is called helical scan, because the heads trace out a helix pattern. You might be confusing that with the head azimuth, which does alternate between fields on VHS to reduce cross-talk or something.
Some other bits of jank in the VHS spec:
- Because the tape is moving while it's being written, it stretches the signal out on the tape. This is perfectly fine for normal playback. But when the tape is not moving, the signal's now too wide for the playback head, and you can only read about half the picture. That's why your VCR had bars of static whenever you paused (unless you sprung for the four-head model)
- Audio is still recorded linearly, and you can't exactly chuck a linear head in an angled, spinning drum. So you have to put the audio head further away from the tape. And that distance is fixed; changing it means your machine is now playing audio out of sync with the video.
Also, there is an extension to VHS that lets you record audio along the video in the helical area, it's called VHS Hi-Fi and it improves the audio dramatically with the trade-off that any minor video glitches will add pops to the audio. Humans are way more sensitive to gaps in audio than video, after all.
I dumped a bunch of albums, and a few CD's, to Hi-Fi VHS. A while back, I stumbled onto a compatible VCR at a yard sale for a couple bucks.
Yes, those gaps are annoying as all get out. Tracking has to be dialed right in to recover the sound properly.
But, once you do that?
It's really great! Frequency response goes almost to zero, and up to 22Khz, and it's flat for most of that range.
One of the albums I recorded had a warp in it. When the actual vinyl was played on a good stereo system it was possible to see the speaker cones actually move in time with the warp. It's essentially a very low frequency signal.
Cassette does not reproduce that. I bet a good reel-to-reel system would.
Hi-Fi VHS reproduced it pretty much bang on perfect!
The best part was being able to add index marks! While recording, one could press a button and get one of those written to the tape. I had several tapes made with music I really like and could access pretty much anything on it quickly.
Yeah, that channel is where I learned it as well. I probably should have linked it.
Basically every video he does scratches that itch of learning a new thing about the world. The analog video series is indeed especially fantastic (laserdisc, VHS, B&W vs color TV, blu-ray, etc).
If a high resolution reader could “recreate” the entire tape signal in memory, you could do the format specific parsing in software. You could even identify the tape type based on the signal patterns
I've heard of someone doing this by connecting an ADC directly off the heads of a VHS player, but I can't find it now. The bandwidth of such a system is only about 6MHz, putting it well within modern SDR capability.
If you "scan the magnetism" for the whole width of the tape -- which such a generic reader for magnetic tapes would have to do anyway -- you can parse out such things after the fact.
adg.
.beh
..cf
Even if your input is "a..db.gec.hf", that should be able to postprocess out later, for any possible angle, given enough resolution.
It's a lot like decoding music from vinyl grooves based on a 2D image scan of the vinyl.
That's going to take an extremely high resolution to avoid cross-talk. For a linear tape with multiple tracks you just need to have a few small heads at different heights.
That sounds like a similar problem to reading unknown floppy formats. I'll bet you that actually scanning the flux (I think that's the term) image of the tape without shredding it is a more difficult mechanical problem.
I think one major network in the US is 720p60, but the vast majority of broadcast transmissions globally is 1080i25 or 1080i30*
Of course sadly so much content is produced at 1080p24 nowadays for that “film” effect it’s rather meaningless for display purposes.
Online of course it tends to be p50 or more commonly p60 (even in 50hz countries). YouTubeers tend to be able to afford more lights and clearer microphones than big budget productions too.
Right, and the fact that there were two different signal standards and VHS was a leaky abstraction that mostly just encoded the signal as-is all adds to the complication of any "generic magnetic tape reader" and hoping to get useful digital data back from that.
That's a backronym. VHS originally was an abbreviation for "Video Home System".
Edit: also, the helical scan on a VHS tape can't really be said to be "vertical". A helical scan already implies a direction along the length of the helix, and "vertical helix" doesn't really make sense in the context of scanning down the length of a magnetic tape. Adding "vertical" to the actual term "helical scan" can really only be an attempt to back-fit an acronym to "VHS".
I am at least aware of the diagonal recording on VHS tapes, that is why I assumed it might be hard do build a generic reader as you could not necessarily take advantage of the geometry or the speed of the tape or things like that. There is probably a good reason for the complexity inside an old VHS recorder.
Other tidbits I recall from what my Dad told me years ago. He repaired VCRs for a while.
The beta machines would phase shift the signal 180˚ every other frame when writing, and they use that for noise cancellation. VHS did four frames at 90˚ each, because of patents.
The read heads were on a spinning drum. Beta machines had an L loading system that would grab the tape and wrap it almost all the way around the drum with the read heads, exposing more tape at once to the reading mechanism. VHS had an M loading system that grabbed the tape on either side and pulled it up, covering maybe half of the drum, because of patents.
And supposedly VHS won out because Sony was begging a lot of money for patent licensing. But tape capacity was probably a factor, too.
This is pretty much the only way 5.25" floppies are read today with modern equipment. While you can still get USB 3.5" floppy drives there are no USB 5.25" floppy drives. Modern PCs don't have the correct drive headers anymore, either, and even if they did, they wouldn't be able to read Commodore or Apple II floppies.
However, there is hardware and software called GreaseWeazle that actually reads the magnetic flux transitions on the disks to extract the data within.
GreaseWeazle is great (I own one!), but it's far from "the only way today".
Not that long ago, motherboards still had a floppy controller. These computers do mostly still work.
So do the ones from the 80s, for that matter.
>USB 3.5" floppy drives
To anybody considering: Don't bother. They can only read/write the most standard IBM PC format. No flux streams.
Instead, get any old floppy drive and a greaseweazle at about the same cost. You'll be able to read and write all sorts of formats, and recover data from damaged and otherwise unreadable floppies.
For VHS there's the VHS-Decode project that's trying to do something similar. I don't think they work by scanning the tape itself with some custom hardware, but rather by recording some kind of internal RF drum head signal inside the VCR itself. Then they have a software stack to decode the VHS signal into actual video. Looks pretty cool, but I've never used it.
TechMoan has used a reel to reel player as a version of this for audio tape. A few obscure formats only fit in rare specialty players, so he's simply wound their internal tapes onto reels and digitized them that way.
This seems quite possible in principle, despite the different helical
scanning, tape widths, speeds and whatnot. A device at the British
Library archival research did similar for wax cylinders and old disc
records, scanning the physical surface with a small wavelength laser
interferometer. AFAIK it generated an obscene amount of point cloud
data.
My thought is that, if you could develop a sensor capable of sampling
magnetic alignment at sub-micrometer resolution it would also generate
unbelievable amounts of data that would first need compressing or
decoding into AV signals.
I remember one of the curators mentioning that they had a ton of WWII records for things like daily newscasts which due to wartime supply issues were made from less durable materials, and since they weren’t commercially valuable the owners hadn’t spent time transferring many of them to newer media.
> My thought is that, if you could develop a sensor capable of sampling magnetic alignment at sub-micrometer resolution it would also generate unbelievable amounts of data that would first need compressing or decoding into AV signals.
Hard disk drive read head sweeping across the tape? Hard disk track widths are well below 1 micron so presumably the potential for high resolution is there?
Nice idea. I think you'd have a problem with shedding. A HD head is
designed to fly/float above a clean platter. Old tape is icky, flaky
mess of brown dust and wobbly plastic that would foul up the head PDQ.
But rather than scanning maybe you could encapsulate a bunch of old HD
densely together in some kind of epoxy/glass to make a high-res tape
head?
In theory you could have some sort of multi head or rasterizing system scan every bit of the tape and construct a 2D map of the magnetization. It would have to be 2D because many tape formats have multiple tracks, not even in parallel. But decoding that data would be a nightmare that made optical character recognition look like child's play.
Really? Couldn't you just 3D model the player and run the simulated tape through it? Pretty amazing if there's something a 70s mechanical device can do that a computer can't do easily.
I wondered the same. We have software-defined radio now, what's stopping us from having a software-defined magnetic media reader? You do need to scan the tape a very high spatial resolution though.
I was surprised to find that there is at least one working Cartrivision system out there[0] and the host of the video says to contact him if you have one you want fixed!
This is incredibly fascinating. The one thing I don't get is how the Cartrivision was used to record off of TV. Was it a built-in feature? Did they sell blanks? Or maybe it was some kind of hack?
EDIT: According to Wikipedia they did have a built-in record feature and the Wiki page even shows an image of a blank tape.
It isn't clear to me why it's unreasonable to have different pricing for rental vs. owning. In any case, the general trend seems to be towards not owning digital media in general.
The licensing of the music on certain movies didn't anticipate the internet. And the studios never came to an agreement. As a result you can buy DVDs of movies like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Fair_Lady and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullets_Over_Broadway, but you can't rent them off of any streaming service. Given that most of us no longer have DVD players, they seem destined to only survive in pirated copies. If that.
For that matter, the licensing of the music on certain TV series didn't anticipate DVDs. Northern Exposure and WKRP in Cincinnati were missing a lot of the original music on the DVDs--although this is apparently partly corrected in the newer complete series releases.
This shit is the entire reason I bother with piracy at all. I very, super-duper much don't want to maintain a media server, but I do want several things in their full, original versions (Beavis and Butthead is one, in fact, but there are several), or that flat-out can't be had otherwise, or whatever, and as long as I'm having to maintain the server anyway....
If they (all these companies) ever fully sort out audio rights, start providing great-quality copies of movies without screwing with them (the 4k77 and related projects are far and away the highest-quality copies of the original, unmolested Star Wars trilogy available, period, for any price, and they're entirely a very-expensive-to-produce volunteer fan-made effort, available for free! WTF?), stop cutting episodes, and stop revoking access to things, I can finally scrap that stupid server. It's 1000% not worth the cost and effort just to avoid paying for the things I watch. Buuuuut if I'm maintaining it anyway, for other reasons, well, that's another matter.
But the second tier ones don't. There isn't so much money to be made from fixing them, nor is there the public pressure. So they languish..indefinitely.
And some game publishers apparently don't anticipate the passing of time (or simply don't care). Multiple games have already been removed from Steam because some licenses for in-game content expired.
The problem isn't the different pricing. The disgusting greedy thing is purposely designing something to destroy itself to enforce that false dichotomy.
Neither the red tapes nor DIVX destroyed themselves. Red tapes were rewound by a store, and any DIVX disc could be converted to unlimited watching if you paid for it.
Plus it's not like CD's/DVD's are incredibly resource-intensive. Remember AOL CD's you got sent for free? A quick Google says one billion of those were sent out. There's about as much plastic by weight in an average Chinese takeout, or a single plastic clamshell of fresh greens at the grocery store.
Awesome for the environment? Of course not. But "disgustingly greedy"? Nope, just a tiny drop in the bucket of plastics usage.
> Neither the red tapes nor DIVX destroyed themselves. Red tapes were rewound by a store, and any DIVX disc could be converted to unlimited watching if you paid for it.
I loved the story of DIVX. As a format, it never actually got hacked to unlock unlimited viewing of the far-cheaper-than-DVD discs.
It never got hacked not because its security was great (after all - a static disk which received unlock codes over dialup, had to have some significant attack surface), but because it sucked and wasn't worth hacking.
Video quality was lower than that of DVD's and soon enough after release, the pricing of used DVD's was close enough that buying DIVX made no sense at all. To say nothing of paying a premium price for all of that in the players.
Having now read about Red tapes, it seems like pure folly that DIVX should have been attempted.
Root of the comment thread was about Flexplay which literally did destroy itself. It shipped in a vacuum sealed bag with an oxygen reactive dye that rendered the disc useless about 48 hours after opening the package.
It didnt make it out of the test marketing stage, thankfully.
Morally - I don't see much difference, and think the push towards "rent everything, own nothing" is a bad, bad idea for social cohesion, economic equality, and general health and happiness.
Realistically - there is a considerable difference in the resources required to create a digital copy of a good vs a physical copy. The digital good has the slight upside that when companies abuse consumers through predatory pricing practices (literal rent-seeking...), they are destroying slightly less of the environment in the process.
I always find it funny when people try to use "rent-seeking" as a pejorative.
Like, yes, someone invested a lot of capital up front and hopes to make a profit by selling time-limited access to what they bought, thereby making the goods accessible to people who don't have the up-front capital.
I can see preferring to own, but as a moral position, "rent-seeking" is synonymous with "risk-taking" and "access-providing."
For my part I am very happy to be able to rent a digital movie for $4 rather than buying a DVD for $20. The risk to me is lower and I'm more likely to try movies I wouldn't take a $20 chance on.
"Rent-seeking" is when there isn't risk. If you set up a new investment in a competitive market, and sell access, that's not rent-seeking.
In this scenario, the predatory pricing is a key aspect of how it becomes rent seeking, and a well-functioning market would not have predatory pricing. And the root issue is tied in to how current US copyright law has major flaws.
Wasn't rent seeking meant to be referring to a party which wedges itself between a buyer and seller and skims a fee off the transaction despite not really adding much value but in some way has made themselves difficult to bypass.
Someone making content and renting it out wouldn't count, while say the App Store fee would.
As a developer, I made a couple of hundred thousand dollars from the Apple App Store. You know how much value the App Store provided me? Way, way more than the 30% I paid (this was years ago).
Without a portal that could direct millions of people to find my app, I probably would have made tens of dollars.
So we can debate fair pricing, but the idea that aggregators don’t provide any value isn’t an indictment of aggregators, it’s a confession of not understanding the business.
> Without a portal that could direct millions of people to find my app, I probably would have made tens of dollars.
Good point. Another often unappreciated point is that it's way easier to convince people to give their credit card to Apple than it is to convince them to give it to some random web site. Especially if they've already given their credit card to Apple, as many of them have.
The real issue with DIVX wasn't the rental/PPV model, it was certain studios who were boycotting DVD, due to poor DRM security. (Which they eventually 'patched' legally.) So it was imperative that DIVX failed to avoid a format war.
It’s not unreasonable. The problem is that blank media imposes a lower bound on the discount that can be offered for these rental schemes (to say nothing of the e-waste) to make economic sense to the seller.
Most consumers aren’t going to rent a movie they can only watch a few for a 10% discount off the price of unlimited views.
For example, Apple typically prices movie “purchases” around 4x of a 24 hr rental (75% off), and that has essentially zero marginal cost of production. With physical media there would be no profit.
I'm not sure how true that is as a general statement. Definitely yes for digital content that used to be shipped on physical media: music, movies, software, books to some degree. Uber and Zipcar (and competitors)--along with incremental public transit and cycling infrastructure along with e-bikes--have probably made it marginally easier to get off without owning a car in some locations.
But other than that I can't think of a lot of examples.
The number of homeowners in the US has plateaued after the Great Recession while the number of people who rent housing has been increasing since then. Yes, your clothes and kitchen appliances are safe for now, but who knows for how long?: https://www.forbes.com/sites/worldeconomicforum/2016/11/10/s...
It might not be the worst idea to make renting houses normal and just as convenient as owning. If rental laws were fixed to provide extreme stability and decent rights, you'd only own for investment purposes. And you wouldn't have extreme upwards pressure from renters trying to buy at any cost to avoid shitty renting conditions.
We really should allow renters to stay indefinitely at rentals and also pass on the general maintenance responsibilities on to them as well.
Renting things like appliances doesn't make sense since you require exclusive access to them and generally use them for their entire lifespan. While houses mostly exist before and after your need for them.
Before that it was DIVX, Digital Video Express (not the codec), who in the late 90s tried to create an alternative to video rentals: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIVX.
These red tapes feel like a ridiculous and cumbersome idea. Thinking about it, their concept won in the end though, in terms of media consumption and ownership...
Our current streaming services feel much more akin to these tapes, where you rely on a centralized entity to decide what you can watch and how, rather than infinitely repayable and transferable video tapes.
Somebody recently said the best phrase on the modern internet is "iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts" because podcasts are probably the most recent media-consumption technology where open standards won out and it's just a bunch of standardized data and metadata you can use as you like.
There's a symbiotic relationship that exists with podcasting that doesn't necessary exist for other media. Podcasters want to reach the largest possible audience because they are paid relative to viewership. Hosting their own content has an expense and doesn't provide them with very effective discoverability. Podcast platforms make their money from having a large collection of podcasts and, for spotify/itunes, podcasts don't generally have royalty fees associated with playback.
This isn't really possible with things like movies.
Yes, but none of that has anything to do with why RSS+mp3 won. If somebody invented podcasts today it would be a walled garden, not an open format where I can point any podcatcher at any host and get the feed.
Either you broke the law many times to fill that NAS, or you have massive gaps in content because those items have never been broadcast or released on disc.
One fun fact I learned when I was toying with Laserdisc is why it was so popular in Japan: the humidity encourages video tape to grow mold[0] unless it's stored somewhere cool and dry. I would love the room to play with more of the obscure / dead video formats but Laserdisc is enough for me. Others here have recommended Techmoan[1] as a good source of vicariously seeing obsolete video formats.
Not about the format here; but I was interested in the image for “Brother Rat” downplaying Ronald Reagan’s billing, whereas the three posters available on IMDB has him basically on top billing.
This reminds me of Jay Bauman's rant about how VHS is a shit format when his Youtube team (RedLetterMedia) obliterated every VHS copy of Nukie they could find in a wood-chipper.
Too bad about the click bait title (I almost skipped reading because of it, but then I saw it was Foone), this is a great history lesson on technology and copyright stupidity!
Just wondering, am I getting downvoted because I correctly gender them, or because I’m happy to read content in a format that I can read without it being a mental issue for me?
Formats like this sort of reenforce Steve Albini's claim that he only records to tape because he's more certain people will be able to play it back hundreds of years from now than any other (digital) format. The tech is super simple and requires no proprietary anything. He believes that even the most open digital formats will become obscure and forgotten eventually and no one will really be able to playback lots of music that was only recorded that way.
> Formats like this sort of reenforce Steve Albini's claim that he only records to tape because he's more certain people will be able to play it back hundreds of years from now
This article seems like a pretty strong argument in the opposite direction: about a tape format which is effectively unreadable without significant heroics (to the extent that a documentary was made about trying to play one of these tapes.)
The format admittedly wasn't exactly successful, and I imagine more common formats would have better luck finding usable hardware. But even then, the tape still degrades.
If I really needed something to last a Very Long Time, I'd print it in highly redundant QR codes on lots of paper, and then also print the specs for QR codes and whatever other encodings were necessary.
> He believes that even the most open digital formats will become obscure and forgotten eventually and no one will really be able to playback lots of music that was only recorded that way.
Oh please. Just use raw PCM audio. No one will ever lose track of how to play that.
A 10.5 inch reel of 2 inch tape can be digitized just fine to 16 bit samples, 44/48kHz, 24 channels, most of an hour. That's about 7 gigabytes. So you could back up a huge number of digitized tapes to a dozen different locations quite easily. You could put a thousand of them on a pocket SSD.
I doubt it. There’s a better chance we don’t even use modern computer architecture and everything about todays computers appear archaic and that all the knowledge is lost. And tons of stuff is left behind.
If you can see the bits, you can figure out raw PCM. It's super trivial.
If we're worried about being unable to access the bits at all, we should consider etching them into metal or printing them on archival paper. Tape won't reliably last hundreds of years. But for now we can keep bits alive pretty easily, with low but nonzero sustained effort.
If you have a lot of tapes, a dozen digital copies will survive a lot more incidents than the originals, and be a lot cheaper than analog backups along with no generation loss.
We should start thinking more seriously about long-term preservation of digital data in general, and I think that one thing that would help a lot is to design our storage (not transmission) formats to include a detailed human-readable description of the format in its headers. Basically just a blob of text, not compressed in any way, something that would be immediately visible and parseable if you inspect the raw data. Depending on how detailed the spec is, this would be an overhead on the order of tens of kilobytes to a few megabytes - for storage, this is negligible, while the long-term benefits are clear.
Sherpix, the company that produced and distributed works by filmmakers as diverse as Paul Morrissey and Alex De Renzy in the late '60s and early '70s, inadvertently helped jump-start the short-lived "Porno Chic" trend with ADULTERY FOR FUN AND PROFIT. Grand prize winner at the second (and last) Wet Dream Film Festival in Amsterdam, sponsored by Suck Magazine which had none other than Germaine Greer amongst its editorial staff, it was the first narrative feature by Richard Robinson and a considerable step up from his "white coater" THE ABC'S OF MARRIAGE. Apparently, Robinson (a/k/a "Rick Jr.") had a thing about wedlock as his 1974 masterpiece MARRIAGE AND OTHER FOUR LETTER WORDS is anything to go by. With a happy go lucky script by E.E. Patchen, who would delve into far darker territory for Chris Warfield's sexploitation classic LITTLE MISS INNOCENCE, he seems more intent however on blowing this cornerstone of society to smithereens on this occasion.
Chunky California Casanova Richard (alleged one shot Frank Harris), with adorably chubby cheeks and great Bay City Rollers hair, has a lucrative sideline going, seducing married women on the brink of separation so their husbands won't have to put up alimony. His employer, a devious divorce lawyer (like there's any other kind !), is played by character actor John Dunn who supplemented his "respectable" work in movies like ANDY WARHOL'S BAD with non-sex appearances in skin flicks like LITTLE GIRLS (now wittily changed to WOMEN by Something Weird to avoid legal hassles !) GETTING AHEAD. This premise provides opportunities for successive sexual encounters with some of the genre's earliest and unjustly forgotten starlets. The classy platinum blonde with the great gams in scene 2 is Susan Westcott, also in Walt Davis' astonishing SEX PSYCHO and BLONDE IN BLACK LACE, an early Johnny Wadd entry by Bob Chinn. Richard charms her with the best pick up line ever, convincing her he makes "the most persuasive Martinis in town", adding "two olives for a pretty lady" pausing a beat "three for you !" How could she resist ? Lynn Holmes is the giggly blonde who was paired with namesake John in both SUPERSTUD and FOUR WOMEN IN TROUBLE and Casey Lorraine recycles her British bitch routine from Joe "Adele Robbins" Robertson's riotous romp LORD FARTHINGAY'S HOLIDAY as the story's catalyst, the dissatisfied wife who blackmails Rick into making it with her gay husband ! As envelope-pushing as early erotica may have been, this scene is suggested rather than shown.
Absolute best of show is an extended sequence that has Richard and a recent divorcée and former client (George Peters, who was in COMING WEST with "nudie cutie" royalty Maria Arnold and Sandy Carey) laying pipe with busty brunette Starlyn Simone from Dominic Bolla's memorably warped ANGEL ABOVE, THE DEVIL BELOW and delectable, fair-haired Rainbow Robbins, star of Robinson's subsequent MARRIAGE AND OTHER FOUR LETTER WORDS as well as Gerard Damiano's extremely obscure EVIL WAYS OF LOVE. They move from fireplace to shower and bedroom, exhibiting sustained erotic enthusiasm throughout, accompanied by several awesome tracks that sound suspiciously like library music even though a composer, Mario Litwin, is credited. This is also the most interesting scene visually as it allows the cinematographers, Sven Conrad and Robinson himself (as "David Worth"), to throw in a couple of clever compositions like both men back to back as they receive oral pleasure from their girlfriends in a nifty mirror image effect. Conrad remained to hone his skills within the industry, graduating to directing with some of the most eye-popping adult movies of the '80s (PINK CHAMPAGNE, BODY MAGIC, DOING IT !) and Robinson went on to helm POOR PRETTY EDDIE, one of the most notorious and hard to shake "blaxploitation" efforts ever.
*
> So DuArt Media Services got to work trying to rescue the tape . . . . DuArt then made a documentary about this, called “Lost and Found: The ’73 Knicks Championship Tape”. It won an Emmy. The punchline? That documentary seems to be lost.
The IMDb page for the film [0] does appear to have an Emmy win as trivia, but I can't find anything about this documentary on the 2013 Sports Emmy Awards Wikipedia page [1] or its source [2].
It is not listed as 'Outstanding Sports Documentary' winner or even as nominee. Same for the 2014 Sports Emmy Awards.
This was aired on MSG Network, a local network for New York sports, so I figured it was probably a local Emmy (like when your local news talks about winning some large number of Emmys).
Indeed, that documentary won in the "Sports: Documentary" category in the 2014 New York Emmys ceremony.
Imdb can be quite innaccurate; an ex colleague of mine is listed as some minor production staff in one of the Star Wars movies, but he never was involved whatsoever. He told me but I can't remember how he got listed.
ABC Britain made this probably amazing anthology series in 1962 called Out of This World [1].
I say probably because out of the 14 episodes made the only one left today is episode 3, Little Lost Robot [2], the first adaptation of Isaac Asimov's I, Robot. The reason we don't have the other episodes? Apparently ABC had this practice of wiping the tapes after the episodes aired. What could they have been possibly thinking.
So many treasure troves, art and otherwise, have been lost to carelessness; perhaps with the new found generatively hallucinatory powers of statistical learning we could see some restorative trend, a retro-magination, based on extant leftovers. Perhaps Aristotle did write a treatise on Comedy after all [3].
The loss of the DuMont archives adds to our extremely distorted idea of the entire celebrity environment of the past. Some of the biggest entertainers have had their entire careers lost, notably Ernie Kovacs: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/dumont-network-gleason...
> In the early 70's the DuMont network was being bought by another company and the lawyers were in heavy negotiation as to who ould be responsible for the library of DuMont shows currently being stored in the facility - who would bear the expense of storing them in a temperature controlled facility, take care of copyright renewal, etc..
> One of the lawyers said he would "take care of it in a fair manner..." He took care of it all right...
> At 2am the next morning he had 3 huge semis back up to the loding dock at ABC, filled them with all the stored kinescopes and 2" videotape, drove them to a waiting barge in n New Jersey, took them out on the water, made a right at the Statue of Liberty and dumped them in Upper New York Bay. Very neat... no problem!
- Edie Adams, comedian, entertainer, and wife of Ernie Kovacs.
> Apparently ABC had this practice of wiping the tapes after the episodes aired. What could they have been possibly thinking.
Maintaining archives of material is actually a pretty complex and expensive process, especially when we're talking about physical analog media (that is sometimes literally a ticking time bomb, as is the case with old cellulose film stock). Also, such media is expensive to acquire, so reusing them wherever possible is useful to keep costs down.
Combine this with the fact that the value of such preservation is often not apparent. Reruns of old material don't provide a lot of value--especially in an era where there are very few available channels--and there's no practical means for making copies of them to even interested buyers, at least in any sort of economical way (see above about cost of media). It's not until around 1980 or so that the home video market is a viable way to make money on old productions, and it's around that time that the wiping of old broadcasts was stopped as a regular practice.
"Maintaining archives of material is actually a pretty complex"
Sure, but the tapes had Boris Karloff himself as host, you can't just wipe a tape with Karloff in the 60s [1] and think "eh, probably no one will ever want to watch this again".
It's just a point how awfully relative everything is. What if Max Brod actually listened to Franz Kafka and burned all his texts. How much we miss because Nikolai Gogol did actually burn the second volume to his Dead Souls.
Is Hacker News secretly funded by J. K. Rowling? Was there a singular precipitating event that got trans folks pissed at HN? Is it a series of factors that I'd have to sift through millions of comments to understand??
It's fascinating. From what I've seen, OP's problem stems from:
* They post something. Someone links to the post here. Someone makes a comment here to the effect of "I think this about what he said". Someone else replies with "actually, it's 'they'". Shitstorm. Therefore, HN is populated primarily by transphobes.
* They post something on Twitter. Someone links to the tweet here. Someone comments on how they wish it was a blog rather than a series of tweets. Apparently the author feels personally attacked by such comments.
* They post something. Someone links to the post here. A Twitter bot tweets the article from here and @s them, therefore they have to keep blocking those bot accounts, and this is apparently HN's fault.
What I find fascinating is that, other than the bots thing, which is now irrelevant because apparently they don't use Twitter anymore, whether someone links to a post of theirs here or not has no effect on them unless they decide to come here and read what people say about it. It's an unusual case of extreme fragility and seemingly wishing to be punished. "Ow! The fire burns me! I should be able to stick my hand in the fire without being burned!"
This sounds like a reason to not like the Internet. You can read comments like this on just about any open forum. And it's perfectly fine to not like that, but that doesn't mean you get to dictate whether other people can talk about what you publish. If one doesn't like one doesn't have to read it.
>They are dictating what can happen on HN about as much as you are dictating what they can post on their twitter.
Hardly. I never said, "Foone mustn't say X on Twitter", or even "they should not say X on Twitter". The latest post actually contains the phrase "NEVER POST ME ON YOUR SITE EVER AGAIN." I'm not even gonna say that they should not make this demand, I just find it pretty funny that they think anyone is going to respect it.
> Is Hacker News secretly funded by J. K. Rowling?
Your comment will likely be nuked because HN posters and admins hide behind a thin veneer of faux-civility and a cognitive dissonance where both information wants to be free and also you're not allowed to point out that the vast majority of posters are bigoted morons. (because "politeness")
They tend to be like the libertarians who are only libertarian because they think it excuses their bigotry and shields it from criticism (or even examination) who then shed their ideals like a molting snake whenever it suits them.
So yeah, pretty much. JK Rowling is an individual who got very lucky by being at the right place at the right time who now thinks they are smarter than everyone else.
HN is quite transphobic. Any post they make devolves into harassment over that and (usually) pointless whining about the format their posts are usually made in (long tweet/toot threads).
edit: also I thought you were referring to buying a bootleg on ebay rather than to the pirate bay, which I'm 99.9% sure it won't be on. It is definitely available in the pirate community, though, because I checked.
I agree. After reading this article, that was the first thing I thought of. Copy protection mechanisms like these were downright obnoxious and it's no surprise that customers get sick of them and go with the cracked/pirated versions. Things like DiVX were doomed from the start.
This particular author seems to be frustrated by some repetitive and minimizing comments from HN in past discussions of their work. Part of the discussion used to be people sharing that twitter threads are annoying and not discussing the contents. [1] And there was a pattern of a few HN comments minimizing past posts saying "it's nothing new" as well as twitter bot spam. [2]
And in a way you've even proven foone right. You're insinuating that they are mentally ill. I don't know why you feel that it's okay to treat other humans like that, but I hope you get the help you deserve.
I don't think "sometimes I get tagged when people link to content I wrote and sometimes internet commenters don't do research to find out people's preferred pronouns" is a "pox on our society"
See, you've misunderstood. To many a website is a pox on society. To many, if you don't completely agree with them, you're the same as a Nazi. I suppose life does become more interesting if you have no sense of scale, can't conceive of nuance, and think everything is life or death.
I understand what you're getting at but the behaviour is just neurotic and childish in general. That thread you just linked is about 30 straight tweets of insane, near incoherent topic switching rambling about a situation this person has created themselves by caring about what pronouns a stranger calls them.
Foone is not the only one expressing this sentiment. Here's another recent example:
> Note: unfortunately, Hacker News found this post. I think I got them to go away. But if you're coming from there, please read about the parable of the Nazi bar and take a hard look at the company you keep, or just fuck off. Thanks.
> oh shit it's hacker news / I've heard that people from the orange VC site are linking to this post! You are absolutely not welcome here. Cohost is not a place for you. Your site is full of sexism and racism that you can't report to the main moderator because he approves of it. / you are bad and you hang out with white supremacists. please leave.
They sound like people bitter because they couldn't get a moderation team on their side. Good! I'm not fond of Nazis, but I don't need or want them silenced. Let them condemn themselves with their own words.
You should have more empathy for people, and rather than diagnose someone expressing a negative opinion about this community with mental illness, assume you might lack the necessary context with which to interpret their frustration.
You can find some of that context in the pile of flagged comments at the bottom of this thread, or any thread where foone's content is posted.
I just read your Twitter thread about HN linked here.
I hope that you'll notice how people here are just discussing the topic of your post and interested.
That people ranting about Twitter posts and pronouns are a vocal minority.
That many people actually appreciate your work and that ending up on the HN front page is a sign of this.
I understand and respect that you don't want to have to deal with this vocal minority who is not nice with you, but I wish they hadn't this much power. They don't only bother you but also a majority of us.
Most people silently read you, most are willing to honor your pronouns, too many of us need frequent reminders not to assume he/him, most people who don't like reading Twitter will not complain and just not read and that's fine.
Maybe HN guidelines could use some update to ask people to stop bitching on one's choice of pronouns and use of twitter to post things like you do. Plenty of tools exist to read them comfortably anyway.
In any case, a lot of love and of course you are free to not want to deal with HN as long as it is not an adequately welcoming place.
Every time foone gets posted here, there is, in rough order:
1) Misgendering, usually out of ignorance. foone is aggressively agender and goes by they/them.
2) Someone correcting the misgendering.
3) The same circular discussion of why foone doesn't like being posted to HN.
4) The same circular discussion of pronouns and the culture war.
5) Culture warriors come out and do their thing and often get their comments flagged and sometimes, though not nearly often enough, get banned.
6) Many of these posts get nuked. Both yours and mine are likely candidates.
It's a guaranteed pattern and foone got sick of it long ago and has asked that submissions of their stuff be banned here. That hasn't happened and thus the cycle will continue endlessly as long as foone does cool shit.
Its not people seeing it, its how people on HN behave when they see it. Which is why it is about posting it on HN not linking to it from anywhere else on the internet.
99% of people around me including close friends pretend sex, naughty bits and porn don't exist. It's this weird social norm black hole that makes other honest interactions feel less honest and more fake. And it's not a victim less thing either - like anything else that we pretend doesn't exist, it allows things and people and issues to fall through unspoken cracks.
Just like with any other topic in the world, if I don't want to hear details I don't need to hear details. And I really really don't want or need to hear 99% of details from more than. 99% percent of people :). But I'd like it to be a conscious choice not a social taboo of shame.
My 2 cents and note I wasn't born with this perspective - it took lots of work and many years to clear out my own social conditioning :-/
(that being said note that the article isn't even REMOTELY about pronography but an Interesting short anecdote about long lost video format and piece of television history. It's safe to read! Even if you're ashamed of your porn!:-)
Sexual shame damages people. I grew up in a Catholic household where my sex ed consisted of Focus On The Family's workbooks, and their blame and shame, sinful outlook on what turns out to be a normal part of most mammalian lives.
Echoing the sentiment of a sibling comment: this damaged me. I'm middle aged now, and some of residual shame-trauma still exists.
That shame mechanism is one of the things that enables sexual predators to repeatedly prey on others, because ashamed people don't report being sexually abused.
Fortunately, I didnt have to deal with that, but given my upbringing (Catholicism, Altar Boy, Boy Scouts), its just down to probability that I was lucky enough to not have been groomed by a pedophile.
There is definitely a place for things that are not shameful, but not spoken about. I am not ashamed to go to the bathroom, but do not talk about it.
I live in a society where all sex related things are in that category. It is impolite and discouraged to randomly talk about anything sex related. But if you have reason [for example consulting with someone with more experience], than it is encouraged and totally OK.
There are VERY strong social norms, including not to be queer, not to view porn, not to commit adultery [to use the example of the OP]. Someone struggling can talk openly to get help. Someone who disagrees (eg. gay) will usually leave the society where they are not accepted.
It is a shame to confuse privacy and self respect with shame.
And when will the people crying about virtue signaling admit the concept goes way, way back. Look at how popular necklaces with crosses are, as a prominent example.
Oh, sure, I agree. But it's never considered. People just seem focused on modern virtue signaling like sharing their belief that some people are transgender (or that that's even a thing). It's a weird right-wing cry fest, which is ironic because the right is associated with the aforementioned cross-based virtue signaling.
We've banned this account for trolling (and for regularly breaking the site guidelines).
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I don't understand? Why would you post a blog on the public internet and then have an issue over it being shared? It's not like HN is reprinting it and the discussions are interesting.
I would not have know about this format if it hadn't been posted here.
I find it rather interesting that someone wants to write publicly and can't deal with others disliking specific aspects of their writing. Not that the readers tell the writer they don't like it, but the fact itself that the readers don't like it and that they tell that to each other. I'm not sure someone this ill-equipped to deal with dissent should be on the Internet.
I'm sure I'm not the first to say this, but I'd prefer to use they/them as the default for people I don't know well (ie, everyone on the internet that I don't have a social or parasocial relationship with)
Who is stopping you from doing that? Use whichever pronouns you want. Unless of course by ”I prefer” you mean “everyone should,” which is a different matter.
I am not staff in any way, but in the spirit of the community, I would just like to point out the relevant guideline here.
> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.
The correct course of action if the article is inappropriate is to flag it. Same for transphobic comments.
> The internet respects nothing, but if respect were to be a thing, repeatedly posting Foone for your guaranteed upvotes probably merits you a lack of respect.
Just FWIW, as far as I can see, this is the very first time OP has posted content from foone. I assume they were oblivious.
This is a complicated problem for a news aggregator, but it won't be solved in this thread. Making off-topic comments is just going to fuel the flamewar I think.
>> I am not staff in any way, but in the spirit of the community, I would just like to point out the relevant guideline here.
> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.
The correct course of action if the article is inappropriate is to flag it. Same for transphobic comments.
Transphobia leads to the suicide & murder of highly oppressed people, so I’m going to choose to continuously break this rule whenever it needs to be mentioned. For doing so, moderation can ban me if they please
I should keep my mouth shut but... I am genuinely very curious: Can you please explain how this sort of conduct is supposed to help reduce transphobia and the associated suicides/murders? I don't follow at all.
When people learn that those whose work/passions they find interesting absolutely despise them & their ideologies
Something clicks in their head. “Why does somebody who leads such a cool life/does cool things not like me/my views?”
In this case, we’re talking about transphobia.
If one person who’s transphobic goes on to find out that Foone, who does cool/interesting enough things that they regularly make it to the front page of HN, is trans - they may finally realize “maybe I’m the bad guy” & change for the better.
This, in theory, leads to less hatred of trans people- which, in theory, leads to less trans suicides/murders.
This probably wasn’t the explanation you were after, nor is it amazingly well articulated, but it’s all I can offer you in this instance.
Not going to reply to anything past this in the thread as a whole - I have posted what I wanted and spent my karma.
If this was the point you were trying to make, then I would agree. And frankly, I truly believe the vast majority of HN users are not hateful despite that it is clear there is an increasing perception that it is. Usually when I flag obvious transphobia and hatred, it is already downvoted to the minimum score. I would hope anyone here would view suicide of any kind as a preventable tragedy. We've seen it happen here before plenty of times to people I'd like to think were highly respected by HN.
Personally I would not take the karma hit too seriously. Like any community with voting, the votes are ascribed more meaning than deserved. People vote mostly out of irrational emotion.
I will close with this: if this was the point you were making I hope you can understand why I didn't get it. The first post seems like you wanted this removed, which is a reasonable perspective, but the best way to get an article removed is probably to flag and email staff. If you don't think this should be removed, or at least are neutral about it, I think the best we can do is at least flag the off-topic comments that made Foone hate this place in the first place. I really hate this conundrum, because Foone makes amazingly good content, and I genuinely, truly believe that it finds it's way here out of virtue that it's just that good, not out of malice.
Unfortunately, as it always is, a minority of terrible people are always out to ruin nice things.
Oh well. I should leave this thread too, at this point.
Promoting a belief that people are born with gendered brains causes (and has caused throughout history) far more harm (in the utilitarian sense of: negative discrimination x females affected) than ‘transphobia’ (which I’m taking to mean simple principled disbelief in innate gender identity and rejection of socially constructed gender of as a primary basis for personal identity).
I really wasn't intending to start a general discussion, I genuinely just wanted to understand what one might hope to accomplish by making off-topic comments, vs the prescribed course of action (flagging the article, contacting HN moderation via email, etc.)
If HN staff doesn't want to prohibit links even at the author's request, I don't see what can be done here. It's a link to a publicly available resource. But I figure making comments like these just stokes the flames, like it evidently is right now. Seems these divisive and irrelevant conversations are more likely to promote hatred than to prevent it.
Unfortunately I've contributed by replying in the first place.
> I really wasn't intending to start a general discussion, I genuinely just wanted to understand what one might hope to accomplish by making off-topic comments, vs the prescribed course of action (flagging the article, contacting HN moderation via email, etc.)
Some topics seem to cause some people psychological distress if they can’t explicitly repudiate the opposing worldview when encountered.
[Honest disclosure] My bad, too - couldn’t not counterpoint my own gender critical beliefs in response to your OP’s implied position.
It was to my knowledge that they had tried in some method, but for whatever reason it was repeatedly worked around & their work kept showing up here, typically leading to them being harassed on Twitter by users coming from here.
You can now see, that for various reasons including this, they no longer use Twitter
I may be remembering some things incorrectly, but that’s the jist.
Just thought I’d pass along the knowledge of their hatred for this site out of respect, as I don’t think most who repeatedly post & upvote their work know. Feels. Grimy as fuck to me, but I’m nobody.
Well, if that's the case, you really shouldn't care. It should be as easy for you to be one as the other, yet those who invoke 'both sides' really only ever seem to be favoring one side.
