What's the best way to get support from voters? Address their fears and concerns and offer solutions.
The biggest fear among Americans today is probably money. A ridiculous percentage live below the poverty line, most have substantial debt, and some have no hope of ever paying back their debt. The American people are struggling, as a society, to make ends meet.
And it doesn't make sense. We're working longer hours than we used to but we're not getting paid more. Many haven't seen a raise in years. So we're all--at some level--asking ourselves the same question:
Where did all the money go?
Ask a conservative politician in America that question. You'll get one of a few responses.
"The liberals took it to spend on their Commie social programs," might come up, but come on. The tax rate hasn't changed all that much for most Americans over the past decade, and most of us still have less and less money. And need I remind you that the people asking the question loudest are the ones who rely on those social programs the most?
You might also get the noncommittal non-answer, "Gee, yeah, I mean, it's really tough for everyone right now, just gotta pull ourselves up by our bootstraps." Yep! Just keep doing what you're doing, it's bound to pan out eventually!
Increasingly commonly, though, we're hearing the scary reply: "It's the fucking Chinese and the Mexicans! Go get 'em! And fuck the Muslims too, while we're on the topic!" Well, there's the fear, but of course there's no real solution offered because they didn't actually address the cause of the problem. They may as well just be dangling some shiny object in front of you, hoping you forget what the question was.
Now go ask a more liberal politician. Many will pass off the non-answer on you too. But the rest are gonna give you pretty much the same response across the board:
"THOSE guys! The ones you were just talking to! They and their backers have, like, ALL the money! Why do you think they didn't give you a real answer?!"
And that's the only response that makes any sense. Why do you not make more money? Because you're working for those guys. Why haven't you seen a pay raise in years? Because those guys don't want to give it to you. Guess who lent you all of the money you owe, and on which you're constantly paying interest? Yep. And they get to make the laws that say how they're allowed to treat you. They make the laws that determine how much of the money they get to hold onto. That's why they get to hold onto basically all of it.
Think about another issue: healthcare. Nearly every first-world nation provides healthcare to its citizens--all of its citizens--as a basic right. Why don't we? Because guess who owns the insurance companies, the drug companies, all the other ways in which people make a profit off of other people's desire to not die of easily treatable ailments?
Yep. Those guys. They're extremely wealthy, which means they can throw a lot of money around to ensure that they get to keep on raking in the dough. It all comes back to them in the end. And hey, I'm not against capitalism. But even in Monopoly you don't get to buy the ability to make the rules. You don't land on the "Income Tax" space and say, "How much does this property cost?"
Thursday, December 10, 2015
Saturday, September 5, 2015
A rumination on local culture lists on social media.
You've seen these posts before. They're usually titled something like, "You know you're in/from <insert locality here> if..."
I hate them. Partly because they get posted and reposted so many times that there's rarely anything in the list that you haven't already seen in the past week. But mostly because the information in them is either far more specific than the title would suggest (for example, in a list of things about Pennsylvanians, claiming that we all call submarine sandwiches "zeppelins"... when almost none of us do) or far more broad (for example, in a list of things about Pennsylvanians, claiming that we all bathe from time to time). And sometimes the information is just plain inaccurate.
Well, I stumbled upon one that looks fairly original. I think I might have witnessed the ur-post of one of these lists. And I'm going to dismantle it point by point right now.
The rules of rural Pennsylvania are as follows:
This should be good. Let's keep a tally of how many aren't even rules.
1. Let's get this straight: it's called a 'dirt road.' No matter how slow you drive, you're going to get dust on your Lexus. Drive it or get out of the way.
Dirt roads are not that prevalent in rural PA. They're usually private roads. If someone from out of town is driving on a dirt road, it's probably because they were originally from the town in which the dirt road is located. They know that their Lexus is going to get dust on it. They're driving slow because they don't want to damage their car. Their car is designed to drive on paved roads, which are the norm in modern civilization. And since this is most likely somebody's driveway, you're probably saying this to your uncle or cousin on the way to a family reunion.
2. They are cattle. They're live steaks or walking milk bottles. That's why they smell funny to you, get over it. Don't like it? I-80 goes east and west, I-81 goes north and south. Pick one.
You're used to the smell of cattle because you grew up in Buttfuck, PA, and never left. Maybe if you'd figured out where those interstates went before you saddled yourself with a family at the age of 17, you'd be living somewhere that doesn't always smell like cow shit too. I'd also like to point out that the fact that we get milk and steak from cattle isn't the reason they smell funny. They smell funny because they're animals and they poop and fart.
3. Pull your droopy pants up, you look like an idiot.
This is considered sound advice everywhere. Like, literally everywhere.
4. Turn your cap right, your head isn't crooked. Only losers wear rally caps.
Ditto for this one. And as far as I know, "rally cap" refers to the superstition of turning your hat inside out in the hopes that it'll help your favorite baseball team win a game. So what I'm gathering from that second sentence is, "rural PA doesn't have any good baseball teams." Which is true.
5. So you have a $60,000 car, we're impressed. We have $150,000 corn pickers and hay balers that are driven only 3 weeks a year.
Well. YOU don't have a $150,000 corn picker or hay baler. Your farm might, or more likely, your neighbor's farm. YOU get to LOOK at the $150,000 farming implements. The people you're making fun of actually get to drive their $60,000 cars every day.
6. Every person in rural Pennsylvania waves. We think of it as being friendly. Try to understand the concept.
Not only is waving not specific to rural PA, it's also not true that everyone does it. I've waved to someone I thought I knew in rural PA before, and it turned out he wasn't who I thought he was. He looked at me like I was a weirdo. People in rural PA can be just as rude and unfriendly as anywhere else. Example: whomever wrote this list.
7. If that cell phone rings while an 8-point buck and three does are coming in, we will shoot it out of your hand. You better hope you don't have it up to your ear at the time.
Because firing your guns won't scare away the deer. Also, people who hunt carry cell phones in case of an emergency. If you don't, you're stupid. Don't be proud of being stupid.
8. Yeah, we eat scrapple, pot pie, funnel cakes, haluskie, pierogies,shoo-fly pie, apple butter, chow-chow, and schnitz un knepp. Don't like the sound of them or the names freak you out because you never saw a "Bon Appetite" article on them? Great, more for us!
It's spelled "Bon Appetit." And no, we don't all eat all of those things. Scrapple is disgusting, and even I had to look up schnitz un knepp and I was raised in a PA Dutch household. And no, they're not all exclusive to rural PA. They're Amish and Polish dishes, and there are Amish and Polish people all over the place. You'll get apple butter literally anywhere they grow apples.
9. The 'opener' refers to the first day of deer season. It's a religious holiday held on the Monday after Thanksgiving.
Heh. That's actually pretty true, except that most hunters in PA would get super pissed if you seriously tried to tell them that deer hunting was their religion.
10. We open doors for women. That is applied to all women, regardless of age.
Yeah, no we don't. Not as a rule. No more so than anywhere else. If someone is following me into a building, I will generally hold the door for them regardless of gender, but I assure you it's not a common thing.
11. No, there's no 'vegetarian special' on the menu. Order steak, or you can order the chef's salad and pick off the 2 pounds of ham & turkey.
Wait, wait. There are no vegetarian options, so literally order a slab of meat? And anyone who wants a salad without meat can just say, "I'll have the <insert salad name here>, no meat." Restaurants will totally do that. Because they want your money, and leaving off the meat shaves like 80% off the cost of a salad. What happened to your "great, more for us!" attitude from #8?
12. When we fill out a table, there are three main dishes: meats (includes fish), vegetables, and breads. We use four spices: salt, pepper, hot sauce, and Heinz ketchup. Oh, yeah...we don't care what you folks in Jersey call that stuff you eat. It’s not real chili.
I do consider fish to be a meat, but Catholics don't, and there are a LOT of them in rural PA. I've never heard of New Jersey style chili being a thing, so that last part was pretty weird for me to read. And if you only put salt, pepper, hot sauce and ketchup in your chili, THAT'S not real chili! (Side note: I suspect that specifying Heinz ketchup was meant to be a point of pride for rural PA, but not only is Heinz the number one ketchup brand worldwide, the Heinz company is based out of Pittsburgh. So, urban PA.)
13. You bring 'coke' into my house, it better be brown, wet and served over ice.
Pennsylvanians are no more or less concerned about others bringing Schedule I controlled substances into their homes than anyone else.
14. You bring 'Mary Jane' into my house, she better be cute, know how to shoot, and have long hair.
I know a LOT of people in rural PA who smoke a LOT of weed. Hell, they grow the stuff.
15. College and high school football are as important here as the Penn State and Eagles and a lot more fun to watch.
Penn State is college football, dipshit. And high school football is popular all over the country.
16. Yeah, we have golf courses. But don't hit the water hazards---it spooks the fish.
You're not supposed to avoid the water hazards for the sake of the fish. They're called hazards for a reason. And if you're fishing in a golf course's water hazard, you're about to be kicked out of a golf course. It spooks the golfers.
17. Colleges? We have them all over. We have state universities, community colleges, and vo-techs. They come outta there with an education plus a love for God and Country. They still wave at everybody when they come home for the holidays.
Vo-Tech schools are high schools, not colleges. State universities and community colleges are tax-supported schools, and therefore can't legally teach a love for God. We also have private universities where they can, but you specifically didn't mention those. And "home for the holidays?" Don't you mean Christmas? ARE YOU WAGING A WAR ON CHRISTMAS?!
18. We have a whole ton of folks who have been in the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and Coast Guard - PA has one of the highest percentages of veterans in the entire country. So don't mess with us. If you do, you will get whipped by the best.
PA has one of the highest percentages of veterans in the country because we have the second-highest population of retirees. After Florida, we are apparently the most popular destination for old people to go to die. Or maybe our elderly still haven't figured out where I-81 goes and don't know how to get to Florida.
19. Turn down that blasted car stereo! That thumpity-thump-thump stuff is not music anyway. We don't want to hear it any more than we want to see your boxers. Refer back to #3
Turn down that blasted pickup truck stereo! That yee-haw-steel-guitar stuff is no more or less music than the thumpity-thump-thump stuff, and hard as it may be for you to believe it, there are a lot of us who don't want to hear that either. Folks blasting their music of choice in their cars is not exclusive to rural PA, and you can get a ticket for it in most urban areas.
20. Four inches isn't a blizzard--it's a flurry. Drive like you got some sense, and don't take all our bread, milk, and toilet paper from the grocery stores. You’re not in Alaska . Worst case you may have to live a whole day without your croissants. The pickups with snow plows will have you out the next day.
Having worked in grocery stores for a decade and a half, I can tell you with 100% certainty that the people buying up the bread and milk when the forecast calls for snow are--without exception--the locals. And they do it when they're calling for even less than four inches. AND who are you to complain if people from out of state come and buy lots of stuff in our stores? Do you think PA doesn't need their money? PA drivers are notoriously bad at driving in the snow--I've been hit by someone who didn't properly weight down their pickup truck twice, and the driver was a rural Pennsylvanian both times. Furthermore, four inches--a flurry, by your reckoning--is often enough to fuck up our roads for that long precisely because the snow plows are woefully unprepared to do their goddamn jobs. One final point: fuck you for your implied disrespect of croissants. Croissants are delicious.
A true Pennsylvanian will send this on to others. Everyone else can leave town.
Only a true, dyed-in-the-cloth, semi-retarded asshole would send this on to others. I'm a true Pennsylvanian, and I take issue with almost everything in it. The final tally of "rules" that aren't even rules, being generous, is 7/20.
Your list is bad, and you should feel bad.
I hate them. Partly because they get posted and reposted so many times that there's rarely anything in the list that you haven't already seen in the past week. But mostly because the information in them is either far more specific than the title would suggest (for example, in a list of things about Pennsylvanians, claiming that we all call submarine sandwiches "zeppelins"... when almost none of us do) or far more broad (for example, in a list of things about Pennsylvanians, claiming that we all bathe from time to time). And sometimes the information is just plain inaccurate.
Well, I stumbled upon one that looks fairly original. I think I might have witnessed the ur-post of one of these lists. And I'm going to dismantle it point by point right now.
The rules of rural Pennsylvania are as follows:
This should be good. Let's keep a tally of how many aren't even rules.
1. Let's get this straight: it's called a 'dirt road.' No matter how slow you drive, you're going to get dust on your Lexus. Drive it or get out of the way.
Dirt roads are not that prevalent in rural PA. They're usually private roads. If someone from out of town is driving on a dirt road, it's probably because they were originally from the town in which the dirt road is located. They know that their Lexus is going to get dust on it. They're driving slow because they don't want to damage their car. Their car is designed to drive on paved roads, which are the norm in modern civilization. And since this is most likely somebody's driveway, you're probably saying this to your uncle or cousin on the way to a family reunion.
2. They are cattle. They're live steaks or walking milk bottles. That's why they smell funny to you, get over it. Don't like it? I-80 goes east and west, I-81 goes north and south. Pick one.
You're used to the smell of cattle because you grew up in Buttfuck, PA, and never left. Maybe if you'd figured out where those interstates went before you saddled yourself with a family at the age of 17, you'd be living somewhere that doesn't always smell like cow shit too. I'd also like to point out that the fact that we get milk and steak from cattle isn't the reason they smell funny. They smell funny because they're animals and they poop and fart.
3. Pull your droopy pants up, you look like an idiot.
This is considered sound advice everywhere. Like, literally everywhere.
4. Turn your cap right, your head isn't crooked. Only losers wear rally caps.
Ditto for this one. And as far as I know, "rally cap" refers to the superstition of turning your hat inside out in the hopes that it'll help your favorite baseball team win a game. So what I'm gathering from that second sentence is, "rural PA doesn't have any good baseball teams." Which is true.
5. So you have a $60,000 car, we're impressed. We have $150,000 corn pickers and hay balers that are driven only 3 weeks a year.
Well. YOU don't have a $150,000 corn picker or hay baler. Your farm might, or more likely, your neighbor's farm. YOU get to LOOK at the $150,000 farming implements. The people you're making fun of actually get to drive their $60,000 cars every day.
6. Every person in rural Pennsylvania waves. We think of it as being friendly. Try to understand the concept.
Not only is waving not specific to rural PA, it's also not true that everyone does it. I've waved to someone I thought I knew in rural PA before, and it turned out he wasn't who I thought he was. He looked at me like I was a weirdo. People in rural PA can be just as rude and unfriendly as anywhere else. Example: whomever wrote this list.
7. If that cell phone rings while an 8-point buck and three does are coming in, we will shoot it out of your hand. You better hope you don't have it up to your ear at the time.
Because firing your guns won't scare away the deer. Also, people who hunt carry cell phones in case of an emergency. If you don't, you're stupid. Don't be proud of being stupid.
8. Yeah, we eat scrapple, pot pie, funnel cakes, haluskie, pierogies,shoo-fly pie, apple butter, chow-chow, and schnitz un knepp. Don't like the sound of them or the names freak you out because you never saw a "Bon Appetite" article on them? Great, more for us!
It's spelled "Bon Appetit." And no, we don't all eat all of those things. Scrapple is disgusting, and even I had to look up schnitz un knepp and I was raised in a PA Dutch household. And no, they're not all exclusive to rural PA. They're Amish and Polish dishes, and there are Amish and Polish people all over the place. You'll get apple butter literally anywhere they grow apples.
9. The 'opener' refers to the first day of deer season. It's a religious holiday held on the Monday after Thanksgiving.
Heh. That's actually pretty true, except that most hunters in PA would get super pissed if you seriously tried to tell them that deer hunting was their religion.
10. We open doors for women. That is applied to all women, regardless of age.
Yeah, no we don't. Not as a rule. No more so than anywhere else. If someone is following me into a building, I will generally hold the door for them regardless of gender, but I assure you it's not a common thing.
11. No, there's no 'vegetarian special' on the menu. Order steak, or you can order the chef's salad and pick off the 2 pounds of ham & turkey.
Wait, wait. There are no vegetarian options, so literally order a slab of meat? And anyone who wants a salad without meat can just say, "I'll have the <insert salad name here>, no meat." Restaurants will totally do that. Because they want your money, and leaving off the meat shaves like 80% off the cost of a salad. What happened to your "great, more for us!" attitude from #8?
12. When we fill out a table, there are three main dishes: meats (includes fish), vegetables, and breads. We use four spices: salt, pepper, hot sauce, and Heinz ketchup. Oh, yeah...we don't care what you folks in Jersey call that stuff you eat. It’s not real chili.
I do consider fish to be a meat, but Catholics don't, and there are a LOT of them in rural PA. I've never heard of New Jersey style chili being a thing, so that last part was pretty weird for me to read. And if you only put salt, pepper, hot sauce and ketchup in your chili, THAT'S not real chili! (Side note: I suspect that specifying Heinz ketchup was meant to be a point of pride for rural PA, but not only is Heinz the number one ketchup brand worldwide, the Heinz company is based out of Pittsburgh. So, urban PA.)
13. You bring 'coke' into my house, it better be brown, wet and served over ice.
Pennsylvanians are no more or less concerned about others bringing Schedule I controlled substances into their homes than anyone else.
14. You bring 'Mary Jane' into my house, she better be cute, know how to shoot, and have long hair.
I know a LOT of people in rural PA who smoke a LOT of weed. Hell, they grow the stuff.
15. College and high school football are as important here as the Penn State and Eagles and a lot more fun to watch.
Penn State is college football, dipshit. And high school football is popular all over the country.
16. Yeah, we have golf courses. But don't hit the water hazards---it spooks the fish.
You're not supposed to avoid the water hazards for the sake of the fish. They're called hazards for a reason. And if you're fishing in a golf course's water hazard, you're about to be kicked out of a golf course. It spooks the golfers.
17. Colleges? We have them all over. We have state universities, community colleges, and vo-techs. They come outta there with an education plus a love for God and Country. They still wave at everybody when they come home for the holidays.
Vo-Tech schools are high schools, not colleges. State universities and community colleges are tax-supported schools, and therefore can't legally teach a love for God. We also have private universities where they can, but you specifically didn't mention those. And "home for the holidays?" Don't you mean Christmas? ARE YOU WAGING A WAR ON CHRISTMAS?!
18. We have a whole ton of folks who have been in the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and Coast Guard - PA has one of the highest percentages of veterans in the entire country. So don't mess with us. If you do, you will get whipped by the best.
PA has one of the highest percentages of veterans in the country because we have the second-highest population of retirees. After Florida, we are apparently the most popular destination for old people to go to die. Or maybe our elderly still haven't figured out where I-81 goes and don't know how to get to Florida.
19. Turn down that blasted car stereo! That thumpity-thump-thump stuff is not music anyway. We don't want to hear it any more than we want to see your boxers. Refer back to #3
Turn down that blasted pickup truck stereo! That yee-haw-steel-guitar stuff is no more or less music than the thumpity-thump-thump stuff, and hard as it may be for you to believe it, there are a lot of us who don't want to hear that either. Folks blasting their music of choice in their cars is not exclusive to rural PA, and you can get a ticket for it in most urban areas.
20. Four inches isn't a blizzard--it's a flurry. Drive like you got some sense, and don't take all our bread, milk, and toilet paper from the grocery stores. You’re not in Alaska . Worst case you may have to live a whole day without your croissants. The pickups with snow plows will have you out the next day.
Having worked in grocery stores for a decade and a half, I can tell you with 100% certainty that the people buying up the bread and milk when the forecast calls for snow are--without exception--the locals. And they do it when they're calling for even less than four inches. AND who are you to complain if people from out of state come and buy lots of stuff in our stores? Do you think PA doesn't need their money? PA drivers are notoriously bad at driving in the snow--I've been hit by someone who didn't properly weight down their pickup truck twice, and the driver was a rural Pennsylvanian both times. Furthermore, four inches--a flurry, by your reckoning--is often enough to fuck up our roads for that long precisely because the snow plows are woefully unprepared to do their goddamn jobs. One final point: fuck you for your implied disrespect of croissants. Croissants are delicious.
A true Pennsylvanian will send this on to others. Everyone else can leave town.
Only a true, dyed-in-the-cloth, semi-retarded asshole would send this on to others. I'm a true Pennsylvanian, and I take issue with almost everything in it. The final tally of "rules" that aren't even rules, being generous, is 7/20.
Your list is bad, and you should feel bad.
Wednesday, September 2, 2015
Seriously, fuck GameStop.
So, remember how I said I canceled my preorder from GameStop after they sent me an email about the price going up? That email said that if I wanted to keep my order, I didn't have to do anything. If I wanted to cancel I could do it on the website or by replying to the email.
Well, I wasn't able to do it on the site, so I replied to the email to cancel it. Today, almost a week later, I got a response. "That order has already been canceled, sorry for any confusion."
So what if I had wanted to keep my preorder? I'd have sat on my thumbs and never got the game I wanted because they canceled the order... even though they specifically told me they wouldn't.
Fuck. GameStop.
Well, I wasn't able to do it on the site, so I replied to the email to cancel it. Today, almost a week later, I got a response. "That order has already been canceled, sorry for any confusion."
So what if I had wanted to keep my preorder? I'd have sat on my thumbs and never got the game I wanted because they canceled the order... even though they specifically told me they wouldn't.
Fuck. GameStop.
Thursday, August 27, 2015
Just a thought...
So I had preordered the physical version of Shovel Knight from GameStop, ahead of its October 2015 release date. Shovel Knight is one of the best games to come out in recent years, in my opinion, so I wanted to support the developer even though I already purchased the digital edition as a Kickstarter backer.
The original preorder price was $19.99, which I think is fair. But I just got an email saying, "the price has gone up to $24.99, sorry for the inconvenience, hope you don't cancel but you can if you want."
I cancelled immediately... after all, I was paying for shipping on top of the now $24.99 price of the game, and Amazon still has it available for preorder at $19.99 with free 2-day shipping for Prime members. And Amazon guarantees the prices it posts for preorder items.
All this is basically to say that GameStop has truly become irrelevant. If they didn't have retailer exclusives (which I don't even care about) there would literally never be any reason for anyone to go to them for anything ever again. I only preordered Shovel Knight from them because they were the only ones offering a preorder at the time.
Fuck GameStop.
The original preorder price was $19.99, which I think is fair. But I just got an email saying, "the price has gone up to $24.99, sorry for the inconvenience, hope you don't cancel but you can if you want."
I cancelled immediately... after all, I was paying for shipping on top of the now $24.99 price of the game, and Amazon still has it available for preorder at $19.99 with free 2-day shipping for Prime members. And Amazon guarantees the prices it posts for preorder items.
All this is basically to say that GameStop has truly become irrelevant. If they didn't have retailer exclusives (which I don't even care about) there would literally never be any reason for anyone to go to them for anything ever again. I only preordered Shovel Knight from them because they were the only ones offering a preorder at the time.
Fuck GameStop.
Friday, August 14, 2015
An ancient sprite comic, resurrected.
Many solar orbits ago, I tried my hand at the sadly-not-lost art of pixel comics. I only remember the joke in one of them, and here's a new version of that one. Click on it to see a larger version.
Originally the strip used a slime from the Dragon Quest/Dragon Warrior series. It complained that the player always just ran away instead of killing it. Several friends pointed out that it's much easier to just mash the A button to kill any slimes you encounter than it is to select the "run" option from the menu. They were right--I don't remember ever actually running from a slime myself.
I may or may not make some more of these as ideas occur to me. If ideas occur to me.
CED, a.k.a. VideoDisc, a.k.a. SelectaVision, a.k.a...
I've mentioned the CED video format in two posts so far, but I didn't really elaborate much on what it is. Essentially, it's a 12" vinyl record containing both video and audio information, rather than just audio like a conventional LP.
RCA's CED technology enabled them to write data to a disc at a density two orders of magnitude higher than that of a phonograph record. It's read by a stylus, much like a phonograph record, although of course the needle has to be much more of a precision instrument in this case. The disc is also spun at a higher speed--instead of the standard 33 1/3 RPM or 45 RPM for phonograph records, CEDs spin at 450 RPM for NTSC and 500 RPM for PAL. Each side of a disc holds up to one hour of video.
Since the discs are very sensitive to dirt, dust and smudges, they're kept in protective plastic caddies that are not intended to be opened by hand. The entire caddy is inserted into the player, which then extracts the disc. After the now-empty caddy is removed, the disc begins to spin and the stylus is advanced to read the disc. After playback of that side is completed, the caddy is reinserted and the player puts the disc back into it for storage.
So what does all of this get you? As it turns out, not a whole lot. Video quality is about on par with VHS; the discs are bulky and heavy by comparison even with LaserDisc (due to the protective caddy); discs and styli wear out over time; and there's virtually no content available on CED that wasn't released on other, more accessible formats. Most of the exclusive material is CED promotional stuff.
Working players tend to be fairly expensive nowadays, and they're a bit fragile to ship. If shipping locks aren't properly installed before mailing a unit, it probably won't work when you get it. Additionally, the belts used to drive the turntable and other functions will almost certainly have degraded into a thick black sludge, so they'll need to be replaced. It's also likely that the stylus will need to be cleaned and/or rebuilt, which only one company on the planet (CEDatum) is still qualified to do. You absolutely must be comfortable popping off the cover and monkeying around inside the player if you want to watch CEDs.
To top it all off, CEDs were only manufactured between and 1981 and 1986, so anything released after that year is unavailable. Due to the limited lifespan of the technology, a whole bunch of stuff released before then didn't get released on CED either.
Why on Earth would anybody want to collect this format then? Well, unless they just think the technology is cool, they probably won't. Seriously. There's almost no reason to own CEDs these days. And this is coming from someone who does have a CED collection. I think it's neat, and that's literally the only justification I can give.
RCA's CED technology enabled them to write data to a disc at a density two orders of magnitude higher than that of a phonograph record. It's read by a stylus, much like a phonograph record, although of course the needle has to be much more of a precision instrument in this case. The disc is also spun at a higher speed--instead of the standard 33 1/3 RPM or 45 RPM for phonograph records, CEDs spin at 450 RPM for NTSC and 500 RPM for PAL. Each side of a disc holds up to one hour of video.
Since the discs are very sensitive to dirt, dust and smudges, they're kept in protective plastic caddies that are not intended to be opened by hand. The entire caddy is inserted into the player, which then extracts the disc. After the now-empty caddy is removed, the disc begins to spin and the stylus is advanced to read the disc. After playback of that side is completed, the caddy is reinserted and the player puts the disc back into it for storage.
So what does all of this get you? As it turns out, not a whole lot. Video quality is about on par with VHS; the discs are bulky and heavy by comparison even with LaserDisc (due to the protective caddy); discs and styli wear out over time; and there's virtually no content available on CED that wasn't released on other, more accessible formats. Most of the exclusive material is CED promotional stuff.
Working players tend to be fairly expensive nowadays, and they're a bit fragile to ship. If shipping locks aren't properly installed before mailing a unit, it probably won't work when you get it. Additionally, the belts used to drive the turntable and other functions will almost certainly have degraded into a thick black sludge, so they'll need to be replaced. It's also likely that the stylus will need to be cleaned and/or rebuilt, which only one company on the planet (CEDatum) is still qualified to do. You absolutely must be comfortable popping off the cover and monkeying around inside the player if you want to watch CEDs.
To top it all off, CEDs were only manufactured between and 1981 and 1986, so anything released after that year is unavailable. Due to the limited lifespan of the technology, a whole bunch of stuff released before then didn't get released on CED either.
Why on Earth would anybody want to collect this format then? Well, unless they just think the technology is cool, they probably won't. Seriously. There's almost no reason to own CEDs these days. And this is coming from someone who does have a CED collection. I think it's neat, and that's literally the only justification I can give.
Tuesday, August 4, 2015
VHS and why it's still cool.
VHS was the first home video format to really take off.
Its main competitors were Beta, LaserDisc and CED. Beta and LaserDisc were both far more expensive than VHS, while CED was bulky and had some quality-control issues that scared off many consumers. LaserDisc and CED were non-recordable media, and while blank Beta tapes could be purchased for recording programming from TV, it suffered from a major drawback that affected all three of the VHS competitors: storage capacity.
CED discs could hold 60 minutes of video per side. If you were watching a movie that was more than an hour long (which is to say, pretty much any movie), you would have to get up and manually flip over the record to watch the rest. If it was more than 2 hours long, it was sold on multiple discs, each of which came in a heavy, bulky plastic caddy for protection.
LaserDisc initially came in the high-quality CAV format, which only held 30 minutes of programming per side. People quickly got tired of flipping the disc after half an hour and then swapping to an entirely new disc after another half hour, so the longer-playing but technically inferior CLV standard was developed. These discs could hold up to an hour of video on each side, much like a CED. Some high-end players eventually flipped the disc for you, so if you had a single-disc movie in CLV format and an expensive player, you didn't have to get up and flip the disc at all... but you did have to wait for the player to start reading the other side. And again, if the movie was over 2 hours long, it was on multiple discs.
Originally, Beta could hold no more than an hour on a tape. Eventually players were released that could record at half tape speed, increasing the capacity to two hours. This enabled an entire movie to be played continuously, as long as it was under two hours long. Longer movies still had to be released on multiple tapes.
VHS tapes could hold up to 4 hours of video in Standard Play mode, and up to 12 hours in Super Long Play.
That's all well and good, but why would anyone be interested in VHS today? It's a good question.
Since VHS was the dominant format for home video for such a long time, and since it was the first, the market was saturated with players. When production costs dropped over time, authoring a program on VHS became financially viable for even small-time producers and publishers. Once DVD hit the market and started to pick up steam, it became even cheaper to put stuff out on VHS because there was a huge amount of tape stock that was in lower demand. This had a wonderful end result:
There is some seriously weird shit out there on VHS.
Weird NJ, the excellent semiannual magazine chronicling... well, weird stuff in New Jersey, put out a VHS tape in 1999. Some of the locations and people featured are the Lawn of 1,023 Milk Bottles, the Gates of Hell, and The King of the Road Ed Geil, an Elvis impersonator who performed by the side of the road just for the hell of it. The production quality is laughable and the features are super weird, and it's one of the coolest tapes in my collection.
Remember that music video that played all the time on MTV in the 90's? The claymation one telling the story of the Three Little Pigs in the form of a metal song? That was produced by Green Jellö (later spelled Green Jellÿ for legal reasons, but pronounced the same) for their 1992 video-only album Cereal Killer. Yeah, they wrote and recorded an album, made a music video for each song, and then released it only as a VHS videotape. Okay, later on they put out a CD, called "Cereal Killer Soundtrack," but originally the plan was for the band itself to be video-only. A weird idea from a weird band with ties to GWAR and Maynard James Keenan of Tool. It's one of the prized items in my collection.
Educational, religious and children's videos tend to be some of the stranger items that can be found on VHS, and recently I managed to find one that looks promising. It's called "Reaching & Teaching with Puppets" and is intended to teach you how to successfully run your own puppet-based Christian ministry. It's 103 minutes of what I can only assume are extremely creepy and amusing lessons. I haven't watched it yet, but I plan to soon, after which it will probably be sent off to Red Letter Media if it's good enough.
You haven't heard of Red Letter Media? Well, they're a bunch of really funny folks who do short films, feature-length films, movie and video game reviews, and other assorted jackassery. I'm a fan of their strange sense of humor and I especially love a show they occasionally put out called Best of the Worst. Each episode they watch three obscure movies, most of which were only put out on VHS, and then discuss them at length and ultimately choose the titular best of the worst.
From time to time they do a Wheel of the Worst episode, where they've got a number of non-movie tapes pinned to a rotating wheel, and spinning the wheel decides which ones they'll have to watch. "Reaching & Teaching with Puppets" seems like prime fodder for that. I highly recommend you check it out--it might even get you interested in what other bizarre crap you can find on VHS!
Its main competitors were Beta, LaserDisc and CED. Beta and LaserDisc were both far more expensive than VHS, while CED was bulky and had some quality-control issues that scared off many consumers. LaserDisc and CED were non-recordable media, and while blank Beta tapes could be purchased for recording programming from TV, it suffered from a major drawback that affected all three of the VHS competitors: storage capacity.
CED discs could hold 60 minutes of video per side. If you were watching a movie that was more than an hour long (which is to say, pretty much any movie), you would have to get up and manually flip over the record to watch the rest. If it was more than 2 hours long, it was sold on multiple discs, each of which came in a heavy, bulky plastic caddy for protection.
LaserDisc initially came in the high-quality CAV format, which only held 30 minutes of programming per side. People quickly got tired of flipping the disc after half an hour and then swapping to an entirely new disc after another half hour, so the longer-playing but technically inferior CLV standard was developed. These discs could hold up to an hour of video on each side, much like a CED. Some high-end players eventually flipped the disc for you, so if you had a single-disc movie in CLV format and an expensive player, you didn't have to get up and flip the disc at all... but you did have to wait for the player to start reading the other side. And again, if the movie was over 2 hours long, it was on multiple discs.
Originally, Beta could hold no more than an hour on a tape. Eventually players were released that could record at half tape speed, increasing the capacity to two hours. This enabled an entire movie to be played continuously, as long as it was under two hours long. Longer movies still had to be released on multiple tapes.
VHS tapes could hold up to 4 hours of video in Standard Play mode, and up to 12 hours in Super Long Play.
That's all well and good, but why would anyone be interested in VHS today? It's a good question.
Since VHS was the dominant format for home video for such a long time, and since it was the first, the market was saturated with players. When production costs dropped over time, authoring a program on VHS became financially viable for even small-time producers and publishers. Once DVD hit the market and started to pick up steam, it became even cheaper to put stuff out on VHS because there was a huge amount of tape stock that was in lower demand. This had a wonderful end result:
There is some seriously weird shit out there on VHS.
Weird NJ, the excellent semiannual magazine chronicling... well, weird stuff in New Jersey, put out a VHS tape in 1999. Some of the locations and people featured are the Lawn of 1,023 Milk Bottles, the Gates of Hell, and The King of the Road Ed Geil, an Elvis impersonator who performed by the side of the road just for the hell of it. The production quality is laughable and the features are super weird, and it's one of the coolest tapes in my collection.
Remember that music video that played all the time on MTV in the 90's? The claymation one telling the story of the Three Little Pigs in the form of a metal song? That was produced by Green Jellö (later spelled Green Jellÿ for legal reasons, but pronounced the same) for their 1992 video-only album Cereal Killer. Yeah, they wrote and recorded an album, made a music video for each song, and then released it only as a VHS videotape. Okay, later on they put out a CD, called "Cereal Killer Soundtrack," but originally the plan was for the band itself to be video-only. A weird idea from a weird band with ties to GWAR and Maynard James Keenan of Tool. It's one of the prized items in my collection.
Educational, religious and children's videos tend to be some of the stranger items that can be found on VHS, and recently I managed to find one that looks promising. It's called "Reaching & Teaching with Puppets" and is intended to teach you how to successfully run your own puppet-based Christian ministry. It's 103 minutes of what I can only assume are extremely creepy and amusing lessons. I haven't watched it yet, but I plan to soon, after which it will probably be sent off to Red Letter Media if it's good enough.
You haven't heard of Red Letter Media? Well, they're a bunch of really funny folks who do short films, feature-length films, movie and video game reviews, and other assorted jackassery. I'm a fan of their strange sense of humor and I especially love a show they occasionally put out called Best of the Worst. Each episode they watch three obscure movies, most of which were only put out on VHS, and then discuss them at length and ultimately choose the titular best of the worst.
From time to time they do a Wheel of the Worst episode, where they've got a number of non-movie tapes pinned to a rotating wheel, and spinning the wheel decides which ones they'll have to watch. "Reaching & Teaching with Puppets" seems like prime fodder for that. I highly recommend you check it out--it might even get you interested in what other bizarre crap you can find on VHS!
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