Some of us still had geocities pages in this era!!

I can’t figure out how to get my cell phone to do what I want half the time anymore, but I bet you I could still efficiently knock you off a page of pretty fancy html code, all set to upload onto your domain space that’s literally three miles long.

It was definitely a wildly practiced sport for sure. If you had kids like we all were, those tapes got used. But for the adults, yeah it was basically just for sport.

My dad had us on the VCR train pretty early on, so we had a model that was from 83 or 84, like whenever they basically first came out for home use. All those scrambl and antipiracy protections they had later on, it wouldn’t pick them up. So if I remember this correctly, as long as you used the older VCR to play the movie, you could copy it on the newer one, and those protections wouldn’t work and it would come out just fine. I even remember, quite vividly, when we discovered that. One of those key moments in our household.

The ol de-srambler. Those were def pretty rare (in my area anyways) I think I only ever actually saw one of them in the wild. We live pretty close to the US border where I’m from, so everyone in my area missed the descrambler phase, but were pretty captivated in that whole DirecTV copy the card and unlock all the channels for free era. My buddy even had the card copier thing and everything, like you’d get whacked and he’d just nonchalantly would stroll back across the street and burn you a new card, and you’d be back up in like 5 or 6 minutes.

The ol era where you figured out like gee I’ve got 600 channels here, but I still cant find anything on that I want to watch lol.

It’s like VCRs now though, in that I don’t think I have an actual player or a disk drive in any of my computers anymore. I think some of them would work in my PlayStation, but I also have Spotify and IPTV, so in the time it took me to write this comment, I’d have it called up.

For the record though, I know for a fact they still largely work. I did verify that a few years ago, when my wife tried to throw them out.

We were friends with a family that had a satellite dish (think like a huge ass monstrosity that was almost as big as the house out in the backyard, not those direct TV small ones on the side of a house that came much later). They had the US movie channels, so they would plow I think it was generally about 3 movies on a tape, and then you’d just take that tape home and we had a couple vcrs at this point, and you’d just rca cable them together, one played and one recorded. And you were the king of the neighbourhood, because you often had movies well before the rental store had them, they’d often still be in theatres.

Your points are on the money for sure. I also found that Blockbuster adapted to my ability to copy a DVD pretty quickly. The whole process back then, if you only had one drive like I did, and you were copying it for a dvd player that didn’t have any of the .Avi codecs (which as someone else pointed out wasn’t very common, and it wasn’t), it took foreverrrrrrr. Like it was pretty much an hour ish long process, sometimes even a bit more in the early days, whereas if you rented a movie from blockbuster they came out with that whole “you can just keep me for an additional $4.99” or whatever it was for that movie, but it very often wasn’t all that much. So it’s like sure I’ve now spent 8 or 9 bucks on this movie I want to keep. But if I burn it, the stack of blank dvds was still 20-30 bucks back in those days, which usually broke down to about like 50 cents or whatever each, so still cheaper. But then you factored in the hour and a half of pissing around, and half the time one of the blank discs would be bad, or you’d screw a setting up or whatever, like it would take multiple discs to do it sometimes, and it just often wasn’t worth it.

That is until the dvd players that could read the .avi codecs caught up, and then .mp4 files and whatever else. Then you could usually slam a few movies on a disc if you didn’t need fancy sound. That was the period of time it became much easier to just d/l and burn. Broadband Internet was in a lot more areas by that time, like you generally had faster speeds to d/l and the burners were burning by then at like 24x or even sometimes ~48x if I remember right. And you could have almost weeks worth of movies on a single dvd, if you were a one movie every few days kinda guy like i was.

Office wasn’t in use as much back then, that was still Lotus and WordPerfect territory. DOS was ok if you knew how to really use it, and it took some learning. I’ve always been a simplicity over fancy UI kind of guy though, so maybe it was just me.

I played the lights off that 25th anniversary edition one. Even more so when someone got the walkthrough for me off the ol local BBS

You can say the same about any full sized truck at this point, everything’s ginormous. Just drove my FIL’s 1500 series Chevrolet the other day, that things ridiculous in size. It probably won’t be any smaller, or maybe just a tiny bit (I’m unsure for exact dimensions).

It takes a lot of finagling. People like you and me, we can minimize it. Custom Roms, PiHoles, VPN, onionized, etc. But the general joe? No chance.

I also don’t fully 100% believe that there isn’t technology at this point that renders all of the above moot. We probably just don’t fully know about it all yet.

So what do we do about my evil twin brother who is a supervillain?

I didn’t believe this was a problem until I watched my wife and her twin sister unlocking each others phones (they aren’t identical but they do look quite a lot alike)

I mean if you have a phone in your pocket, you are completely dicked. I’m not saying we should be accepting it (dont), but it’s completely fucking hopeless right now. We are boxed in on all fronts.

It always booted fast enough (well as fast as computers were then). It was pretty fucking useless though. Dos was still way more useful and efficient in those days.

I’m not in America, but they are fairly rare where I live (Canada). Like if I go for a drive in traffic on a commute, I maybe will see one or two at the very most. And it’s usually the same ones that I am seeing when I do see them.

I mean the market for a vehicle that’s >100k, looks like the truck you drew as a child when you were asked to draw a truck, that has almost zero utility and almost certainly has to be awkward as fuck to drive and park due to its width and size, I mean that market is right next to zero. My seven year old is pretty into them though.

On the second part, why don’t you just leave peoples vehicles alone? I mean I dont like Nissans either, but I’m not out laying subtle hints to damage people’s property because I don’t like them. That doesn’t make anyone sympathetic to a cause, it makes them more steadfast for whatever you are against. Absolute 1d thinking.

I don’t even like steam. I wish everyone would fuck off with these launchers. Especially considering the price of storage and memory in our hallucinatory times.

I remember the original being pretty mid. Am I remembering wrong? Like it was interesting for a few days and then I don’t remember ever playing it again…

And here I am just waiting for my Tesla to be able to self drive itself (reliably) to the corner store. You know, like I was promised in six months back in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, it’s for sure 2021 you guys, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025, 2026…

Its not even the price, it’s just the principle. If you don’t hold something, you can’t control it. You could have a license expire or come under dispute on a game, and suddenly you can’t play it anymore because some random back county judge issued a ruling. A bit extreme of an example, but what’s often more the case, you buy something on a store, and then the console company cuts the store (Nintendo with DS & 3DS for example).

I’m sure the emulation and piracy/preservation community will see us through all of this, but the less popular stuffs going to get lost to time. It’s always better if you have physical media somewhere with the files you need.