Not just DVD's but also music CD's. Plenty of music from the 1960's through early 2000's is no longer online for either contractual disputes, or cultural cancellation and other reasons I have yet to figure out. I assume some of this transition must be the cost issues of producing physical CD's vs. delivering online or renting the music online. When it is only available as a stream online I call it renting and every day that passes there is a risk that some of the music vanishes.
When I moved I compressed my CD collection down from their hard cases to soft cases and kept all the inserts in one of the old hard-case bags minus the hard case plastic holders and I have no regrets.
I assume there may be a similar risk in renting e-Books online vs. having a non-DRM copy of it.
You get the benefits of both physical media, and convenience of soft storage availability. That music is mine, and can never be sold to me again.
In case some might be wondering what the "benefits" of physical media are; it's my belief that having to _commit_ to listening to a CD (not being able to flick through different albums and artists easily on Spotify, as the whim comes) is psychologically sound, and the alternative is damaging.
This goes for films too. Those old enough to remember renting DVDs — or even VHS! — may remember the excitement of getting that film back to their place to watch. The whole thing was an experience, and whether the film was good or bad, you had a good time with whoever you were with, because you had an _experience_. More often than not though, you enjoyed the film, because you wanted to. You invested, so it was worth more to you.
Actually this is more than "my belief", but I can't be bothered to find the research.
My personal best example of this is tape-trading (which were mostly CD-Rs, but whatever) underground metal back in the '90s. The sheer amount of work it took to find people to trade with, burn the music, send it through the mail and, best of all, get their package in return made it seem so significant. And it was the best way to find out about new bands. Even bands that eventually became huge, like Metallica after they changed their sound, built their initial fanbase via the trading scene.
I did the same thing with DVDs, Blurays and CDs. Everything got pulled out of the hardcase unless the hardcase was a special design or unique in some way. Kept the inserts for each media type in a couple of small shoebox sized storage boxes, put each disc in to a soft sleeve that I bought in bulk for about two cents each, and then put all that into two banker's boxes. Reduced from eight or nine banker's boxes to nothing at all. The digital contents are stored on my local server and I can stream it to any local device or over the internet to my laptop or phone.
I went the other way… back in the day, I ripped my ~400 cds to MP3’s. I still have them on my file server hard drive, but am happy paying Spotify $10/month for the convenience of having access to pretty much any album I want on any device, so I haven’t listened to my own MP3s in years.
I thought by now I’d be doing the same thing with movies, but obviously that hasn’t happened.
I know it doesn’t replace old recordings, but moving forward there is a lot of great music on Bandcamp, usually available to download in several lossless formats like wav and flac.
Same here, although I no longer have a CD player which is kinda worrying. On my TODO list to convert them all to lossless FLAC or something to replace my previously more conservative lossy settings from when $/GB was far greater. Bookmarked the article posted on HN the other day about doing this in a reliable way.
The other thing about music is it has a far higher re-play value than Film/TV... some specific albums I've listened to thousands of times, and there is simply no way I would rely on some streaming service for that. I'm not sure what the younger generations do for their favourites... or maybe it's not like that any-more, maybe their music is more ephemeral and "trending". Pretty much all of my music with replay value is from way before 2000, back to 80s - I'm not even that old.
It's just nice to pop a good CD into a nice CD player and play the whole thing. Also, despite what some people may claim, there can be huge variations in sound quality between different DACs and their associated output stages, whether or not the DAC happens to be inside a CD player, your computer, or an outboard USB device and this can easily be measured and heard by people who know the program material well.
Many people think the best sounding DACs are the multibit jobbers from Philips which haven't even been made in thirty+ years.
You say 'never' but I see the capacity for companies to remotely delete things on users drives that feel like may be in copyright violation as a foregone conclusion at this point. It is an inevitability. Since both TVs and computers are usually internet enabled, you'd have to super careful to never expose that drive to the net. I mean who is going to stop them? Lawmakers? chuckle-snort. The supreme court? giggle.
In 2035, your hard drive will have firmware with built-in CSAM filtering, which - after a legal battle in the high court - will get hijacked for copyright enforcement.
That’s eerie. I say almost exactly the same thing. I don’t know if I feel fortunate to have lived thru the period of people having access to personal computers that they actually owned or sad because I will know the pain of having had it.
Yea I feel that. I honestly think that the only reason my goals aren't to just buy a piece of land in rural Canada and live life in peace is because it's not the lifestyle my girlfriend wants. That being said, we still want rural living, just not as extreme as I sometimes dream about
If you have the physical hardware, there will be people able to produce their own firmware that disables built in filtering, or at least, disables the internet connecting that reports said filtering. You'll have a server that is disconnected from the internet with all your DRM free content.
They would have to outlaw personal computing, and not allow you to build your own servers with no firmware-enforced filtering, which given the current direction, is not particularly farfetched, but at that point battle is lost anyway and your DVD rips are the least of your problems.
RoHS and lead-free solder insures that the relatively open hardware we have today won’t function in the future, post-personal computing being outlawed. I don’t think it’s a vast conspiracy, but rather a happy accident.
That's the other benefit of offline backups; you can have as many as you want. If a solar flare wipes out every hard drive I own simultaneously, I think I might have bigger problems than a lack of TV shows to watch.
Quick plug for "Mr. Burns: a Post-Electric play", where an event wipes out the electric grid and people start trying to recreate an old Simpsons episode.
That sounds like the onset of a Cory Doctorow story. Armed autonomous Netflix' bots bearing down on your residence to physically delete your Bojack Horseman copies — all legalities taken care of by the newly amended copyright protection laws.
I've been hoarding every bit of music I've composed since the eighties. What advice would you give, before it becomes a serious problem?
I'd also like to ask: how old is the oldest thing you own? And, additionally, what are the two oldest things you own?
At what point does having more than one of something become hoarding?
Keeping your own work is completely different from keeping everything you've ever watched on Netflix.
Michael W. Smith tells about being in the studio, and not being able to get something to sound right. He went back to listen to an old work tape, and realized "OK, nobody should be playing but the piano. That's what's wrong right now in the studio." If that's what you do, keep it all, even the "in process" stuff.
But as I said, stuff you watched is different from stuff you made.
Humans used to gather around fires and listen story tellers at night. Now we gather around our glowing screens to watch stories unfold. You can take humans out of the woods and plains and put them in houses, but we don’t actually change much. It ain’t hoarding. It’s keeping stories around.
Do you have an actual point? If so, maybe you could state it, because this sounds like 1) speculation, 2) completely unrelated, and 3) gratuitously insulting.
I didn’t realize how many small changes were added to the BluRay version. The worst part for me is the re-colorization into cooler tones to make it look more modern. 4K77 version looks more goofy - just like I remember it from my childhood!
Which are transferred from the 1993 LaserDisc release, aside from the text crawl of A New Hope. The 1993 LD did use the subtitle "Episode IV: A New Hope", the 2006 DVDs took it from the original film again, but the rest of the movie is a LaserDisc transfer.
Yeah I have the DVDs here right next to me. What I always disliked though is the butchered format, they letterboxed the 2.39:1 original into a non-anamorphic 4:3 frame. Wasted quality and you have to auto-crop by your video player. Maybe one day we will get a proper digital scan from the original cinema reel.
I think public discussion has moved beyond making people aware of illegal copying / streaming, and how to do it. So the people who don't engage in that probably have their reasons.
If you're trying to move some readers to start doing that, you'll probably need to engage with their reasons.
So if it was never released on DVD or Blu-ray, then where did the source for the torrents come from? If I saw a file with the name of something I knew wasn't available on a shiny round disc, I would be very skeptical and hesitant to download it from fear of it not being what it said it was.
I damn sure don't want to go to the hassle of downloading a VHS transfer
For example Final Space got cancelled and while the last season was available on streaming services the physical copy hadn't been released and was also cancelled. (So it is a webrip, got pulled from streaming services)
If a VHS transfer is the only way to re-experience something that blew me away as kid, you bet I'll be happier with a VHS transfer than with nothing at all.
What's really nice are the heroes who take those VHS transfers and SD DVD copies and release AI-upscaled versions. Particularly cartoons that never had blu-ray releases look glorious upscaled.
On YouTube, been watching Siskel and Ebert reviews that are clearly VHS transfers. It works. I'm just watching to enjoy their banter and queue up some films I missed from the 80's and 90's.
You remember when pirate copies were literally some guy with a camcorder in a cinema? Sometimes you'd get unlucky and the guy had to turn it off because the usher was coming, and you'd miss a random chunk of the film :)
> So if it was never released on DVD or Blu-ray, then where did the source for the torrents come from?
If it's something old without a DVD/BluRay release these will usually be a WEBRip (literally a screen recording of DRM'd content) or a WEB-DL (someone has cracked the DRM, or it was DRM free).
You'll only find VHS rips on highly specialized trackers (usually).
From its streaming service when it premiered. A LOT of TV has come out on streaming but has never been physically published. A majority of it, I'd guess.
Private trackers and usenet generally don't suffer from this issue but it requires a few hours of work upfront, less if you know someone who can help you.
DVDs are easy to backup. Lots of software out there, and there's nothing low level to worry about. Audio CDs also have lots of software out there, but you have to be a bit more picky if you're concerned about getting a bit for bit copy rather than just a sounds the same copy. If your discs have hidden tracks and all that kind of weird stuff, care is needed.
Once you have things onto your filesystem, the usual rules of backups apply.
which would include keeping the original disc ripped to make this new copy that needs backing up. more than one copy. more than one format. more than one location.
>I still don’t actually use our DVDs and Blu-rays all that often. But every time I see them lining the shelves, I feel a bit of comfort. Because when I do need them, they’ll be there.
The importance of that type of redundancy depends on the viewing habits of a particular person. In the case of my friend, the "don’t actually use our DVDs all that often" really was "never re-watched the DVDs she owned". She had a DVD collection with all the X-Files seasons, James Bond movies, etc.
But she inadvertently learned her true viewing habits when Amazon Prime included video streaming for free. She realized she always preferred watching something new on Amazon rather than play an old X-Files DVD.
But what if Netflix and Amazon Prime Video lets their streaming licenses expire for "X-Files" and it's no longer available? Wouldn't that make the X-Files DVDs a great backup?!? It would, if she actually re-watched the X-Files -- but she never did. Owning DVDs was a waste of money for her particular viewing preferences (new stuff instead of reruns) and she was happy to get rid of the clutter.
> But what if Netflix and Amazon Prime Video lets their streaming licenses expire for "X-Files" and it's no longer available? Wouldn't that make the X-Files DVDs a great backup?!? It would, if she actually re-watched the X-Files -- but she never did.
The problem is that the future is uncertain. It's always possible that she might want to rewatch the X-Files at some point, even if she never actually does.
Or, she might recommend that someone else watch them. If they are no longer on streaming services, she could loan them her DVDs. It is either that or pirate them.
> … the future is uncertain. It's always possible that she might want to … even if she never actually does.
True, although …
"Difficulty discarding possessions is characterized by a perceived need to save items and distress associated with discarding them. Accumulation of possessions can result in living spaces becoming cluttered to the point that their use or safety is compromised. Compulsive hoarding is recognized by the eleventh revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th edition (DSM-5)."
Don’t read too much into the DSM definitions. There’s an (often explicit) caveat that they apply iff the condition distresses the patient or seriously affects their life.
It’s healthy to hang onto a few ratty t-shirts because you might need them to mow the lawn or because they remind you of good times; you can even be a bit bummed when you eventually do throw them out. It’s compulsive hoarding when you do it even though it seriously bothers you or turns your place into a death trap.
This is my same conclusion. With books, movies, series and music I like to own physically only my personal favorites that I know will use many times. But that’s less than 10% of my media consumption.
> With books, movies, series and music I like to own physically only my personal favorites that I know will use many times.
I don't own many DVDs, but when I see them in my bookshelf they remind of the story the tell, the context when I watched them, and my theories about society, sci-fi, and utopias that those movies inspired.
With books it's even more extreme. I get the physical copy sometimes more to have a physical representation of an idea than to read the book.
I have books I've never opened since I read them that is just a marker like that. I have one copy I've never opened: I read it as an e-book but got the physical copy just to complete my set and have it on my shelf.
I also have books I've suddenly taken down to reference 20+ years after I read it, and where the text was not online, so I also like to have physical copies of books where the idea mattered because I know that some day I'll want to pass that idea on and will need a refresher.
Rip the DVDs, keep the digital copies somewhere safe, and discard the physical discs.
If you want to ensure that this remains safe, you'll need to both back up and periodically transfer the digital copies to new physical storage devices (in my case, I just upgraded from the ~4-yr-old 4TB HDD that was holding all my media to a new 16TB HDD). This is, however, kind of a necessity in any case; especially for burned DVDs, for instance of home movies, ripping them and storing the media fully digitally with a plan for long-term archival will have much better longevity. Even pressed DVDs don't last forever (especially if they are used sometimes—scratches happen!), and burned DVDs can have a lifetime of less than 5 years in some cases.
Data, however, if properly treated, can be perfectly saved forever. (Well, barring cosmic ray bit-flips, I guess.)
It is. It happens to fit my use case better, though—my viewing habits are very impulse-oriented, and the place I keep the media is my Plex library, so I can just fire up a web browser and watch anything I keep in there any time I want, from anywhere in the house. (I could probably set it up to be able to watch it from other places, too, but I'm working from home, so I'm usually there anyway.)
So if I just kept the DVDs, any time I wanted to watch something on one, I would have to:
1) Physically go to where the DVDs are
2) Locate the specific DVD I'm looking for (can be tricky if I'm looking for a specific episode of a show—I might not always remember what season it's from, and the Plex interface makes it pretty easy to scan through)
3) Get the DVD out
4) Go to the living room, where the DVD player is
5) Take exclusive control of the living room, and also bind myself to being there, for the duration of watching it
6) Put it all back when I'm done
So yes: for simple storage, as long as the DVDs you have will last the length of time you want to keep them, and you have enough physical space to keep them in comfortably, just keeping the DVDs is easier. But for actually using them on a regular basis, for places with less available space, for people who expect to be moving frequently (or just soon), and for collections where the longevity of the physical media is in doubt, digitizing is a better way to go.
Who is trying to store DRM'd content locally? If you're ripping your DVDs/BluRays/HDDVDs striping copy protection and that's a solved issue. See AnyDVD HD, MakeMKV, etc.
Also note that page is referencing releases of Ubuntu from 2008. Maybe take it's information with a pinch of salt.
For the BluRay drive itself I have a "Pioneer BDR-XD07TB"[1]. For great compatibility and can do HD/UHD (and DVD obviously).
For a purely Linux way (as you linked to an Ubuntu Page) this[2] is a reasonable guide (giving it a quick skim) using MakeMKV. This should also work on Windows. (Ignore the Haandbrake steps here).
If you're on Windows (or know how to setup a VM with USB passthru for the Bluray drive) and don't mind paying for a license AnyDVD HD[2] is very good.
Both of the above will strip the DRM and leave you with the raw files from the disk (AnyDVDHD also gives the option to make an ISO). You can keep there as a 1:1 backup of the disk or you can further refine.
Without going to a massive rabbit hole and reproducing some (unfortunately private) guides verbatim you have 3 main things you can do from here if you don't want the raw source files.
1. Straight Remuxing: Take the video/audio as is from the `m2ts` container and stick it in an MKV, this won't save you any real space but makes archiving the film alone easier, you'll save some space from extras etc. by deleting the raw source files here. Takes about as long as a copy operation would. You can do this with ffmpeg on the cli in a single command.
2. Audio transcode remuxing. Take the raw video, transcode the audio to something smaller. You use a bunch of tools to strip the Audio[4][5], then transcode it using eac3to, then remux everything[6]. Realistically you've saving maybe a gig here if you're just transcoding the main audio track and dumping the rest. Some time spend recompressing the audio, then remuxing maybe an hour once you know what you're doing. This is usually what you'll see as a "Remux" on the high seas.
3. Compress Audio/Video: This is where you'd use something like Handbrake[7] to recompress the video, you can use the presets and get a watchable file but not the best quality but usually a significant size reduction. You can also tweak a lot of knobs here for excellent quality with little to no visual fidelity loss (a transparent encode) but this will take a lot of time. If you're using a preset you're probably looking at roughly the film's length encoding (more with slower processors). This is usually what you'll see tagged as a "BluRay" release on the high seas.
Obviously this is all for backing up your legitimately owned media in jurisdictions which allow it.
1. Bluray drives are becoming increasingly rare. Few people are buying them (because many stream) which is slowly killing the market.
2. Blurays tend to be much more finichy with read errors (unfortunately). A little dust or a bad pressed disk and the entire episode is lost :(
3. Blurays aren't being produced. Sure, you can get bluray movies still, but for tv series it's becoming REALLY rare for a bluray to be produced. Funnily, you'll often find DVDs for tv series before blurays (even for brand new shows).
Touch wood, but I have never, ever needed to do this. I don't know why. Every time I get something from the video library (yes, we still have one) or buy a new movie I'm worried it'll complain about no internet and want to update ...
Me too, I have a few big cd wallets (like 12 by 12 by 6 inches thick) where I put my dvds as I rip them and discard the cases. They don’t take up much room and prove that I own all of the movies I ripped.
I converted them to mid quality mp4s so can keep a copy on a 512gb usb flash drive so I can take my movie collection anywhere I travel.
How do you know? Are you reading them? If so, you're just exposing them to more of the elements that will degrade them. They were never designed to last forever.
And if you're not reading them regularly, then you'll only find out they've gone bad when it's already too late.
There is a reason why transferring backups to new media is done on the regular by professionals. They know that the only way to make sure the copies are good is to ... well, make copies.
Yes, I took all of them out, played the music discs (some are now in my car), and consolidated the data discs a year or two ago. But it wasn't because the data discs were bad, simply that CDR doesn't have the capacity for today.
One of my old photo/video backups is on 100GB Verbatim Bluray. Don't know about these in the future so I did a parity scan on each of them so errors can be fixed if need be. Also on external HD. Let's check in, in twenty years.
I thought the layers separate and they are not a good long-term storage medium. Aren't DVDs supposed to decompose after some time? Or is that only true for CDs?
I'd rip them and put them on new hard disks from time to time. AFAIK, that's the best long-term storage strategy for most people.
Me neither, but there are some exceptions. The original Star Wars trilogy, LOTR, Dune, ...
My wife loves Harry Potter.
So we got these ripped. We ditched her DVD collection after ripping everything. Legal copies, saving space. Don't even think we brought them to some second hand store.
IANAL but I don’t think your rips would be legal if you gave the discs to a second hand store or any other person.
Circumvention clause of the DMCA probably makes DVD rips illegal in the US, even if you keep your original copy and don’t otherwise violate copyright law.
In The Netherlands, yes I am quite sure they are legal copies. They'd been even legal copies if you rented them and made a copy. You don't need to own the original, all you need is that the source was both legal and legally in your possession. You're then allowed to make a copy of it for private use. You're not allowed to distribute it further, you don't have a license for that.
My US ex did the same. She'd rent Netflix DVDs, rip them, and bring them back. Tho that was a long time ago as Netflix DVDs suggests (2005).
Furthermore, I do not feel morally bad about the practice, and the chance of getting into legal trouble with such (if it were illegal) is so small that I simply wouldn't care. You'd have to face a civil court, and how would any party know about your collection if you keep it private?
I rarely get DVDs any more, for much that reason, but I'm just finishing up stripping the liners and archiving the last of ~1000 DVD's I bought over the years. They now take up one and a half shelf in a book case.
In terms of cost, it wasn't a waste of money to me: I spent the money to watch them that once. With a few exceptions I never bought with the expectation of rewatching in mind. That was a nice bonus. And now I have an archival copy, and while there are many I haven't rewatched, there are are plenty I have, and some I've rewatched many times, and it wasn't always predictable ahead of time. There are series I loved a lot I never rewatched, and movies I didn't know I'd like that I've rewatched half a dozen times.
These days, I don't buy if it's something really mainstream, but I still buy if it's a bit more niche and something I consider might not always remain available. Quite a lot of the DVD's I have are of things that are not available on the streaming services I have.
But separate to all of this, even for a lot of the movies people might never watch again, don't underestimate the value of that feeling of comfort to a lot of people, and the value of the physical artefact as a memento.
Pirate bay is that backup option, at least for me. To use your example of the X-Files, you can currently download a 75 GB torrent with every season + extras and it will only take a few hours.
I think people continue seeding torrents for longer than DVDs reliably last.
I've never understood the appeal of downloading pirate movies.
Feels dodgy, always a hassle trying to fight your way through all the scams and malware and porn and when you get the movie it's of questionable quality.
If I buy a DVD then I get perfect quality in a nice case in a day or two without having to visit the seedy red light district of the Internet only to get dud contraband.
The only reason you see scams, malware and porn is because you don't have an adblocker. Install uBlock Origin. It's mandatory not just for pirating, but even for normal browsing.
It does take a but of time to spot fakes, and you need to give the community time to aggregate good content and weed out the fakes, but it's definitely not the experience you describe. It sounds like you last tried a decade or two ago.
>I've never understood the appeal of downloading pirate movies.
Oh, that's easy! You want to see <movie>, so you search for "<movie> 1080p" (or better) and after a few minutes you have it on your PC and can watch it 1,000 of times if you want; even when offline (!). It's also free. This is why people like pirate movies.
Or you live outside of USA and there is no store that has X files dvds. Also no streaming service offers that here. Also due to copyright and region locking, I cannot import them from USA.
But somehow if I pirate that, i cause them 'damage'.
Luckily on most sites, pirated videos have keywords in filename (720p, 1080p, 4k,... x264, x265,... ) so you can see the quality and choose what filetype you want/need.
None of those apply if you put a modicum of effort into it, and then you get access to almost all media in human history unencumbered by the copyright "people". Without having shelves filled with plastic crap.
> Feels dodgy, always a hassle trying to fight your way through all the scams and malware and porn and when you get the movie it's of questionable quality.
Its actually really easy, it only takes seconds to get the right torrent going. I've never accidentally torrented anything I didn't intend to.
I'm not sure of what are you exactly picturing in your mind about how the experience is of downloading a pirated movie. But opening up the qBittorrent application in your PC or Mac, clicking on the "search" tab, and writing "Pirates of the Caribbean", doesn't feel at all as interesting and creepy as walking at night through the red lights district of amsterdam. That'd be awesome!
I'll buy the bluray/dvd, then download the torrent for the movie to put into Plex. Like a backup, but MUCH better and easier on the size than I would be able to do myself.
I'd be curious in a few years. I don't watch old things anymore and keep consuming youtube stuff, but honestly I don't like it anymore. It's not the same somehow.
Like others, I don't rely on the streamed content being available in the future, so I hoard content.
I wrote a Python app that runs on a Raspberry Pi that continually plays the content that I have accrued. Some of the content I schedule, other content is random.
It just runs on a downstairs TV. I enjoy accidentally catching some old film, or a musical or something I pulled down from YouTube of a guy making furniture....
And now it feels like 2/3rds of media doesnt have a dvd or blu-ray release! So awful.
This has been such an ever enmissserating situation. Started as a high & mighty &bgood convenience, but we're ending up worse than where we started; fragmented & ephemeral.
I remember the middle section of shelves at Blockbuster. I'm quite content not having access to a lot of that schlock any more. A lot of it didn't deserve to be put on DVD!
I'm reading the "so awful" within the context of this thread more of an accusation for someone making the decision to not allow content vs I just wish it were on DVD for my convenience. It's not all conspiracy theories. Sometimes, it's just financial. Some older content was done on such a cheap budget and companies that we'll just call fly by night. These types of places might not be able to remaster their content for blu-ray either because they no longer exist, don't have the funding to re-transfer the film to a higher scan, or just physically no longer have the materials.
One real danger of putting all historical video media on streaming sites is that it makes it far too easy to introduce an Orwellian Ministry of Truth that is empowered to rewrite the past to make it conform to today's acceptable social norms, academic ideologies, government agendas and so on.
For example, one could make the argument that Alfred Hitchcock's entire library promotes negative stereotypes of women - and it's true, women in Hitchcock films are not the strong types, they're more often helpless victims who have to be rescued by male characters. This clearly, one could say, promotes negative female stereotypes which are damaging to young women so all those movies should be removed from streaming services.
One could continue in this manner, selectively pulling anime movies because they promote excessive violence and sexuality to a teenage audience, or war movies like Apocalypse Now and Dr Strangelove that portray military generals as clueless maniacs, or if the pendulum swings back to the social conservative end, pulling all horror movies that don't portray Christianity in a positive light or have too many Satanic themes, and on and on.
Keeping hard copies in your personal possession is one way around this, but since the copyrights and hence distribution rights are held by these conglomerates that don't want to get in trouble with some political group or other by making them available, nobody else can view them without going through pirate sites - a very unfortunate situation.
This seems weird. No one disagrees that there are 2 biological (genetic) genders. Gender identity is something entirely else that is being actively researched.
This is a pretty disingenuous take isn't it? Dylan Mulvaney carries tampons as a service to others who might need them because she was once asked for one in a bathroom.
No, because while Dylan sometimes says that, the rest of the time they talk about the miraculous changes to their body, etc, and participate in female sexual health panels. They're trying to have it both ways as convenient.
If you feel that this is incorrect, go to Wiki and try to edit Rachel Levine's entry to remove the word female and you can personally see how the community views this.
Ok, so what you said was in fact untrue? Dylan says she has tampons for other women, in separate other videos she talks about changes to her body.
With regard to female sexual health panels this also appears to be a fabrication. I googled this and your comment was one of the first results, unless you mean the NowThis News panel with Biden? That being a progressive news org having a media moment with the president, not a female sexual health panel as you've called it.
Your last point is complete non-sequitur. You're operating from a place of discomfort and then working backwards toward rationalisation, that's much is clear from the half-truths you're telling. If there were any concrete concerns beyond your personal feelings you wouldn't feel the need to lie.
My point in this is that the official word on high and filtering down to all levels is that transwomen, males who claim to be women, are female and I think I've shown that regardless.
I am very uncomfortable watching institutions that my daughter appreciated, such as girl guiding, being appropriated by crazy gun-toting men https://www.womenarehuman.com/women-interviewed-by-police-fo... and for the women who complain to be targeted by false reports and doxing.
In many languages, like German (which may be GPs native language), those two things share the same exact word, requiring modifier words like "biological" to differentiate between the two, making everything a bit confusing when crossing the language barrier.
It appears that way, but skirts around the gametic model of discerning biological sex that is the golden standard for other species, while elevating the status of chromosomal defects.
It’s a good example how selective presentation of scientific realities can be abused to mislead.
Chromosomal defects in a binary system don’t constitute a new or between-state, and it also isn’t commonly described that way: XXY (Kleinfeltner) affecting males is the mainstream position.
It really isn’t quite that simple. There are Intersex people who have ambiguous genitalia and there are several viable chromosome combos besides XX and XY.
Using accurate information? Not ignoring the complexities of the world?
That comment is absolutely correct; to make things more confusing, people whose sex appears female can turn out to have XY allosomes in some, or all[0], of their cells.
From your own link Morris syndrome affects males. In fact, the presence of a Y chromosome by definition means the person is of male sex and it really is as simple as that. One's appearance has no effect on their sex.
Those are birth defects though. For instance, we still understand humans as being bipedal despite anomalies that prevent a tiny fraction of humans from being bipedal.
`XXY` is a valid combination of sex chromosomes. The person has two `X` chromosomes so is female. The person also has one `Y` chromosome so is male. Which sex is the person? Is it a birth defect?
XXY is Klinefelter syndrome. By definition it's a condition where boys and men are born with an extra X chromosome. Their sex is male because, also by definition, the presence of a Y chromosome means male.
In sexually dimorphic mammalian species sex is most commonly by the ability to produce either the small or big gametes, not chromosomes.
In humans syndromes that lead to ambiguous (“intersex”) presentation and/or chromosomes are still operating in a binary system, eh Klinefelter affects boys.
The same is true for (very) rare hermaphroditism: in this case both gametes could in theory be produced, in practice though individuals are sterile.
Sort of like the anniversary edition of ET where Spielberg replaced the guns with walkie talkies, and other digital edits. Ironically he was criticized for too much smoking in the West Side Story remake. And sometimes a film I want is nowhere to be found, even a mainstream, older hit. I keep a few boxes of DVDs to make sure I can show them to the people stuck in the Matrix in the future!
The lack of smoking is something to ponder. It's always so glaring to me when TV shows that take place in the '80s and '90s show almost no one smoking, when in fact if you went into any public place, probably 30-50% (or more, if it's eg a pub) would be smoking, including in people's homes, offices and so forth. I wonder if the huge and realistic amounts of smoking seen in shows like Mad Men will be edited out one day.
I grew up when there was a smoking section on the plane (BTW, why do modern aircraft still have ashtrays? Are there any airlines that allow smoking?). I miss All in the Family. Is it even available anymore?
The ashtray is actually mandatory even in new planes per FAA rules.
Modern aircraft still have ashtrays in the washrooms because they’d much prefer that somebody choosing to sneak a smoke puts their cigarette somewhere other than the washroom trash bin where there’s a history of them starting fires.
Rail travel is one of the last places that you still see this in the US.
I took a cross-country Amtrak trip right before the pandemic, and most of the conductor's announcements were just to tell us when the next smoke break would be.
When the train got stuck waiting for cross traffic at a freight yard in rural North Dakota, an incipient passenger mutiny forced them to break the rules and let everyone pop out for some light trespassing and nicotine consumption.
It felt strange in a similar, but opposite way to what you're describing.
It’s close but not quite. If it were truly ‘80s, there would be no need for stops because everyone would be smoking in the train. Probably the worst example of this was when I travelled through Turkey in the ‘90s, mostly by bus and train. The air was so thick you could cut it with a knife.
This is like keeping a shotgun in your house to protect against the government. If the government is ready to conduct systematic disinformation campaigns, your DVD’s probably won’t help.
Can someone clarify this chain for me? Keeping a gun to defend your home against the government is probably futile because the government always has more weapons and more fighters than you.
The other three cases were all wars - an apples to oranges comparison.
They are trained to do anything they are told. Anything.
Remember the Chinese military had no problem mowing down protestors if their bosses give the order.
That said, it is easier and safer to defend yourself from a government in modern society with information and free uncensored communication than with guns.
No, in the United States, the military and all federal employees explicitly swear an oath to the Constitution, and are forbidden from executing illegal orders, regardless of the chain of command.
Yeah, PLA goons in Communist China certainly do things differently.
In the United States, the people are the government. Where are you?
All the members of the NSA swore an oath to the constitution but what they actually followed were the orders of those cutting their paychecks to spy on the American public.
Also note all the leaked footage of our military gleefully mowing down children and keeping score. They are never prosecuted for war crimes either. Just part of the job.
That is how humans work everywhere. The US is not special.
No. But the police and FBI have fighters (I should have used the term agents in my first post, and I am using it to mean anyone exercising force on behalf of the govt).
We do have that. It's the library of congress that ensures the safety of culturally important media in the US.
And of course we have public libraries with all kinds of good media.
I don't think the comment your replying to is even talking about public libraries. I believe they're saying if society determines a person is cancelled and it's on a streaming service, it can instantly disappear from most streaming media.
I don’t think it’s about individuals getting canceled. It’s about how the streaming service has carte blanche power to decide the material on the service, regardless of what society wants.
My point was this. Maybe they have that carte blanche power. Isn't a good public library system (where the work is also accessible) a good enough counterweight to that power?
An original streaming-only movie or tv show will never be on a DVD at a library. I would say it is almost an -service- to society to continue to torrent content that has been edited or purged by major platforms.
Our public libraries are underfunded and used as a punching bag by conservatives. Libraries have very limited shelf space and must constantly prune items from the collection. If a movie isn't checked out for a few months, it gets sold for like 50 cents and replaced with whatever is currently in demand.
Most public libraries don't have the resources to archive materials. That's mostly down to academic and specialist libraries, and the library of congress.
> I do know they tried to keep an archive of all public Twitter posts for a long time
That was the result of a specific deal Twitter made early on (itself a marketing stunt, of sorts). It doesn't mean the Library of Congress is generally in the business of archiving DRM-ed media on streaming services.
What measure are you using for "largest"? The US is 3rd in the world by population and 1st by GDP, so in absolute terms it's to be expected that they would be "large" in many categories, simply by having more people and money. (And then there's geographical extent.) The relative (per capita, perhaps) measure is more salient.
Based on books in circulation (overall and per capita). Also for anybody who isn't familiar with interlibrary loans, check it out. In the US you can get access to almost any book around the country sent to your local library. The system is amazing.
If you mean the library of Congress sure. If you mean the most libraries not based on a quick google (https://www.quora.com/Which-country-in-the-world-has-the-mos...). But I guess it depends on what you mean. I am genuinely curious as there are several ways of looking at this.
Also, the person above could have been talking about compared to days past. I can tell you the libraries I had access to when and where I grew are less funded (many closed), but again depends on where and what you’re comparing against.
Comparing size without considering population will only lead to bad conclusions. Could you imagine someone claiming cancer deaths in Germany aren’t a problem because it doesn’t have near as many deaths as the US, it’s not even close? Sounds silly, right?
The US is reportedly 62nd in the world in libraries per capita. [1] Given the US has more wealth per capita than most of the world as well, I think claiming we underfund our public library system is fairly obvious.
> Given the US has more wealth per capita than most of the world as well, I think claiming we underfund our public library system is fairly obvious.
This is only the case if you think the proper level of funding is a function of population size or wealth instead of whatever is required to obtain sufficient results. If you're looking for results, it seems the proper level of funding would actually scale with population density (sparser areas require higher funding per capita to provide the same access).
I think you can make a case for that sort of model, but I don't think it's "fairly obvious".
Mentioned elsewhere, but books in circulation (overall and per capita). Also, in the US you can get almost any book from elsewhere sent to your local library at no charge.
I’m in Illinois; under state law libraries exist as independent taxing bodies - the only way to underfund or otherwise interfere with them is at the ballot box, and it would take years of concerted effort by at least 60% of the local population (indicating that this is really what they want).
I have some family in Indiana; their libraries are funded and controlled at the county level to maximize what they can do cost-wise and to ensure that rural farmers also have access to all the resources. That structure also makes it much harder for goofballs to interfere.
The TV show Community is missing an episode on Netflix for some reason (edit: reason was Ken Jeong in what could be interpreted as blackface).
The IT Crowd is missing one in some geos because it was considered anti-Trans by some - that episode also has the unrelated and hilarious plot where Roy and Moss convince Jen that they're loaning her a "black box that holds the entire internet".
Yes [1], mostly the episodes that involve Kaitlin Olson's character, Dee Reynolds, who aspires to a career in comedy, herself inventing and portraying racially insensitive characters within the story of the show.
I'm not the type to rail against such things generally, but IMO it was unnecessary and misguided to remove these episodes: their humor came deliberately from how oblivious Dee was to the offensiveness of her act.
Indeed, her portrayals are usually immediately and explicitly critiqued by her fellow characters as being racist and insane.
This is somehow the most mindnumbing. It's a show about terrible people doing terrible things. Like, they can only display certain, acceptable, forms of terribleness?
The main character in Noel Fielding's Luxury Comedy is a black face, but do people honestly say any face painted in black is racist? Noel is clearly using a black face in his show for artistic reasons and isn't racist in the slightest... IMO.
Nor should we forget the social contagion risk of suicide
> After the series' release, a study published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry found that suicide among teenagers rose by 28.9% in the month after Netflix launched the show.
Who's the "man" in this case? Not me. Not a man, and I see that study as a single data point associated with a single event. There are many studies on the social contagion effect of suicide, enough that it's worth considering the possible impact of how suicide is depicted in media.
While 28.9% sounds like a shocking number, it was only a few dozen additional deaths.
A few additional concerns with the paper:
-The authors made no effort to try and determine if any of the people who died had seen the show, or even had heard of it.
-Suicides were up the month before the show was released as well.
-In fact, suicides in that age group had been trending up for years according to their data, which is not mentioned in the discussion of results at all.
There are some episodes like that where... like, I am against censorship in general especially considering the state of our world right now, but it is still weird to me that a cadre of writers thought that would be a good idea to make - and network executives agreed!
With a very heavy perspective. Among the recurrent signs, the following suffices:
> inviting laughter and derision toward the... community
No. Just finding an occasion for the selected direction in creativity. Which the writer of the article seems to want to make ideological, with the exception of one use of the expression "«cheap laugh»" (which, for that matter, may bring attention to the other "celebrated" subplot of "the elders of the Internet" - using the same perspective, it would be as if "making cheap laughs through a sort of "ableism"").
Nah dude. I recently re-watched the whole show, and while I liked certain parts of it... it's a very transphobic show. And it's not just that episode; that episode gets callbacks in future episodes all the time.
It's a mean spirited gag, and the mere fact of being transgender is the punch line, over and over. It sucks. It makes revisiting the show more cringey and less fun.
Since you raised your doubts, I just re-watched it - series 3, episode 4. And I confirm the view.
The whole episode is about the clumsiness of living, consistently with the project idea ("the IT crowd", outcast specialists with little interface to the public, which is a mass of people thrown into some role "«not doing much work but constantly having affairs»" - confused humans -, with a link which is the portrait of incompetence trying to make a living - trying to live - into something she does not understand). All the characters do is "attempting", trying to fit a role. The difficulties of living roles could be a trigger for the development of the substory involving Douglas Reynholm and April (and the gender instrumental to that). The whole idea climaxes in the "collapse of civilization" when the "stakeholders", as "topmost layer of the role-players", are in front of the catastrophic loss of the Internet, and the "punchline from above" is that of Moss: «It really isn't that funny» - of course, because it is tragic.
While I could see that the "It's over" scene could be to some extent insensitive, given that the writers may have supposed that it would be something lived by a number in such group, it was instrumental to the fight scene, which is a consolidated topos. And the "victory" seems to be on the other side, since the "punchline from inside" is that of Douglas, which ends the episode crying, going "It's not the same!" (It's not the same without her, or him - as she was both the "other half" and the "pal"). So, not only I do not see a phobia, but on the contrary, I see the opposite message, towards seeing people for what they are, and to love that whatever they are (also since the premise of the whole is, as said, that they will be confused imperfect players) - Douglas could not and he is alone crying.
I don't recall the episode, been probably 10 years since I watched the show, but lots of things "suck" if you watch them through your 2023 eye. Whether a show came out in 1955 or 1999, I just enjoy it as a product of it's time.
Definitely true. I'm not here to say that no one else can or should enjoy the show, or that it's unique in having aged poorly in some respects. But the problems with that episode and later ones (which are not entirely one note about Douglas' relationship with the transgender woman, despite the very painful fight scene and the overwhelming fact that being transgender is the punchline) are real and not made up, and I can understand why they'd be deeply uncomfortable to many people.
> Whether a show came out in 1955 or 1999, I just enjoy it as a product of it's time.
This is great when one can do it, and I think it's a fine approach. But of course, if you were gay in 1955 or trans in 1999, there's probably a lot of shows where certain issues— common enough at the time— would have really diminished your enjoyment and maybe even triggered some dysphoria, even 'at the time'.
I mean, "was considered anti-Trans by some" is pretty charitable for that episode. It is pretty overtly anti-trans, and the show as a whole was written by grahan linnehan who has also been vocally anti-trans
The classic issue with censorship. "I don't enjoy it, therefore, nobody should be allowed to enjoy it. And I won't be happy until nobody else can enjoy it. If you enjoy it, that makes you <insert moral judgement here>. And because I am not that, and nobody who is <insert moral judgement here> is for that content, it should be removed."
Now... I will admit, it isn't always wrong (CP). But it often is the fruit of an unwitting narcissism.
There is also a possibility that the poster subtly willingly replaced 'anti-' with "[all that in actual evidence from this side appears is that apparently,] you don't enjoy it", and on that basis returned to (an argument about) the original point of censorship.
A very "semantically open" use of 'anti-', as some may be surprised to know that there are people who watched that episode and did not judge it the least deprecatory towards any category.
"I mean", as if Douglas Reynholm (the "phobic" - finally, a literal case - in the episode) was drawn as an exemplary character, a model of a human being... "I mean II", I checked on a search engine for the spelling of the surname, and the first under-link stub that resulted is «Douglas Reynholm was an incredibly arrogant, self-righteous, pompous, cruel and elitist egomaniac who considered himself to be somewhat above everybody else. He viewed women as objects to feel and manipulate to his incredible sexual mania»...
--
Edit: Furthermore. As "everyone" knows, Graham was a humble watchman in the hospital where Dr. Rick Dagless worked (the "Darkplace"), and probably does not even speak TCP today. So, when he wrote the scene of the people who believe they have in front of them "the Internet" - like the one called "«stupid cow»" by an adlibber because she did not realize "the internet is weightless" (and so also must be "the box which is the Internet" in the scene) -, when he wrote that, did he mean to diminish and elicit contempt for all the non technically inclined, probably including himself?
Some academicians insist in seeing Art even in "popular" works. But also beside that, well, you would lose a popular work - if somebody did it, they probably "put something in it".
That episode of Community also explicitly referred to the black face as a "hate crime." I don't think it's so much a matter of interpretation as that was the direct gag they were going for.
Do we know who actually pulled the content? Netflix clearly doesn't have a policy against streaming partial amount of content when they can't get it all from a provider but it's not clear to me if Netflix pulled a single episode of Community or if the licensers maybe refused to license that episode. I think I read that Sony was supportive of the episode being pulled.
I think most of this content will come back once the industry as a whole sort of figures out the positioning. There are something the creators are embarrassed by and it might never come back but I expect there to be a new rating or something similar (Disney+ does this already) where they'll indicate before the media plays that it may be offensive or insensitive. News shows do this when covering certain types of crimes.
If a streaming service is concerned about this, instead of dissappearing an episode, they could put a disclaimer slide at the beginning: "<Streaming Service> does not approve of the views made within this episode. Click <here> to skip to the next episode."
I've heard that the official clips of Saturday Night Live on YouTube are routinely posted with edits in which significant chunks are excised for "problematic" jokes, without any notice.
The IT Crowd is missing one in some geos because it was considered anti-Trans by some
I have a lot of mixed feelings about this one; though I don't think the ep should be removed, it is in poor taste and arguably defeats its own comic intentions. I suspect the deeper objection is not to the content per se but how it reads in the context of Graham Linehan subsequently aligning himself as a massive transphobe and making it into a political cause.
I don't know Linehan personally, but grew up near him and followed his career since long before he went into television, when he was writing film and TV reviews in an alt-weekly paper for beer money. He has always been a comic genius, able to turn excruciating social pain into hilarious farce, while also being willing to cheer on success. I remember he once opened a movie review for a film called Eat the Peach with 'At last, an Irish movie that does not make me want to run to the toilets and lick all four walls.'
That kind of self-criticality and emotional nakedness has deep roots in the Irish identity, and it is what makes Roy, an Irish man working for an incomprehensible and irrational corporation in London, such a compelling character. I find the show especially entertaining because I've been that person, doing that exact job, working for those kind of companies in London, often under bosses like Jen or Denholm/Douglas Reynholm. Linehan's character portraits, even for a single episode or scene, are incredibly sharp and truthful. In The Work Outing, where Roy and Moss unwillingly accompany Jen to the theater, there's a scene where Jerome, an extroverted PR guy, is introduced to Roy & Moss. No sooner has Roy diffidently said hello than Jerome exclaims 'Oh my god you're Irish! I love Irish people! They're all mad aren't they! They're just mad!' and the exchange spirals downward into cringe. The whole episode is a comic masterpiece, but this brief scene has a special place in my heart as I've had that conversation hundreds of times in my life.
In this scene but also in general, the engine of comedy is the mismatch between characters who are quirky and self-conscious (like Roy and Jen) and those who are quirky but oblivious (like Moss, Douglas Reynholm, and here, Jerome). When characters go against their 'natural' type they get punished in hilarious ways, by being stuck with the baggage of their transgression which then multiplies itself exponentially. The plot frame for this episode is that Jen tries to be oblivious in pursuit of a date with another oblivious-seeming person, who turns out to be even more painfully self-aware than she is. As in all restorative comedies, the characters who transgress end up feeling worse but wiser, nothing really bad happens, and everything returns to normal.
In The Speech (the 'banned' episode), hopelessly insensitive CEO Douglas Reynholm meets an attractive lady journalist, April, and romance blossoms. Despite her repeated advisories that she used to be a man, Douglas thinks he's found the perfect woman who not just tolerates but admires and enjoys his shallow hyper-masculinity, sharing and even exceeding his love of bad action movies, heavy drinking, and competitive sports. But gradually reality gets through even his dense skull and he ends the relationship - briefly taking responsibility for the situation, before reverting to type and deflecting blame back onto April. Mutual recriminations quickly escalate into a fist fight straight out of a bad action movie, with Douglas wins - thereby regaining his 'boss' status - by knocking April out. He is subsequently shown as being vilified in the press and sobbing over the loss of his erstwhile companion, with whom he was actually compatible.
(Roy, Moss, and Jen are relegated to the less-important plot frame story in this episode, which sets up but is peripheral to the emotional conflict of the main story. In dramati...
> Rather than compromising or de-escalating, he raised it to the level of a political issue asserting that his civil rights (of free speech) were under attack
Curiously, in doing so, Linehan chanced upon an actual civil rights movement, of women losing single-sex spaces to males who choose to identify as women, and started championing this instead.
Though, many gender critical feminists find Graham's unasked-for presence in their activism rather embarrassing and irritating due to his generally quite aggressive behavior and his occasional bouts of sexism.
Maybe limit the actual truth to the top 1-5% , and leave the masses to the sanitized version of history… which is basically the status quo in the west with mainstream media / Hollywood, and CCP in the east with China.
I would be interested to see that article. I tried googling for it but could only find some articles about censorship on Chinese streaming sites and Netflix missing some scenes from the DVD release due to issues with the master copies.
It was probably 10ish years ago I read about it. Most likely on BoingBoing.
Will see if I can find it. Indeed it is not easily dug up.
There are many ads about the coming trend of "Virtual Product Placement" but none that I can find which acknowledge the early attempts at it which I read about way back.
There was a case of it just recently—the Amazon Jack Reacher series was released in February (around tax time) and had a TurboTax ad edited onto the side of a building when viewed in America.
It's more nuanced than you are presenting here. The obvious middle ground is the use of "Poison Cabinets" where certain works are deliberately and explicitly separated from their contemporaries with obvious labels explaining that they express ideas or opinions known now to be harmful. This way they are not lost or erased but also not treated as if they are perfectly normal and acceptable.
For another thing, there is also at least some element here of the right to be forgotten. It's obviously different for groups vs individuals but our systems should allow some amount of agency to people who regret things they have produced in the past and wish for them to be forgotten.
> One real danger of putting all historical video media on streaming sites is that it makes it far too easy to introduce an Orwellian Ministry of Truth that is empowered to rewrite the past to make it conform to today's acceptable social norms, academic ideologies, government agendas and so on.
I see such rewriting of the past, or at least attempts of that, on Wikipedia. It's not really hidden as there is a (hopefully!) integer edit history, but who reads the edit history anyway? Usually you just look at articles as they are at the current moment.
As we don't have much "hard copies" of a lot of stuff any more around the possibility to "rewrite the past" for significant amounts of people becomes a real thread as we rely more and more on digital and purely online data.
Given how "durable" our digital data is future historians will have a very hard time. Maybe our time will become a dark age when seen form the future. Have you tried lately to open some files from the 80'es that reside on some storage medium form that time? And that's only a few years in the past. Imagine 500 yeas in the future. What will be left of all the cat videos on YouTube (and maybe some more important data)?
Every time I look at a controversial article, and I'm unconvinced by the implicit narratives, I will look at the history, and more often than not there are interesting details lurking in the past versions.
And sometimes it's just fascinating looking at how details on a situation unrolled over time. Like for instance, go look at Jeffrey Epstein's Wikipedia history: there was an article on him preceding the publicity of his abuse.
I am under the impression right now that Wikipedia history is quite permanent unless an article is totally deleted, and that people do not prune the history of content they wish to censor. I hope it remains this way, cynically I don't think this will always be so, prove me wrong Wikipedia!
Could you give some examples of a page on Wikipedia being rewritten? I’m familiar with the incident of redefining what a ‘recession’ is but I’m always curious for more examples.
One person's collection serves that one person, but there are some really cool groups out there like DocuWiki[0] that try to archive every documentary out there and serve them on the eDonkey network. There's been numerous times I've failed to find a documentary by even the original publisher. Like I literally couldn't give them my money no matter how much I tried. And even libraries didn't have it. But good old DocuWiki always had my back
Her husband ian't right about dvds, the government is wrong about how they are regulating streaming services. The government needs to enforce reasonable content licencing across all the services like they did with music and radio stations decades ago so all content is on all services and the services start competing on vectors that actually matter to consumers like interface design and fast content delivery networks.
No, I’m saying that food companies would act like media companies do if food was trivially replicable, and therefore the fact that they currently don’t is not an argument for anything.
There have been disputes between food brands and UK supermarkets recently that resulted in specific products being unavailable in specific supermarkets.
Retail exclusives including in grocery do exist. They are rare and limited to "high end" brands that are normally low volume, but there are things that I can buy at a Kroger that Walmart does not sell, and things I can buy at a Walmart that Kroger does not sell.
Radio and streaming isn't equivalent though, streaming is the end product, radio was basically advertising for the music.
We live in pretty much the golden age of content where more is produced than ever before and more is being spent on it than ever before I cannot see how what you're proposing doesn't end up with a decline in both of those things because there would no longer be competition in content.
Availability and ownership aside, Blu-ray is far better quality than what you’ll get on most streaming services. If I really care about a movie or show, I always get it on Blu-ray.
That said, if they could shift 1080 BDs down to DVD pricing and UHD BD down to what BD costs now I would buy a lot more. I’m starting to build up a collection of UHD Blu-rays but Jesus, £20-30 per movie really adds up. Definitely paying the enthusiast tax there.
1080p Blu-rays are very often single-digit dollars, at least here in the US. UHD does come with a higher price point, especially for new releases; it goes down, but it can take many months for it to do so.
I started buying UHDs (mostly Criterions) recently. I mostly don’t like owning too many things (and even buy most of my 4Ks on iTunes when they go on sale for $5) but for some films the extra quality is worth it (plus you can’t get the Criterions films in 4K anywhere else, and I like having the access to the features).
I always am wondering if I’ll regret it in 10 years when you may be able to stream super high bitrates, but as always, the future is uncertain anyways.
> But I also wish that streamers would create Blu-rays of their original content. I should be able to purchase the complete Bojack Horseman on Blu-ray to hold on to it forever—what if something happens to Netflix?
Like you or not, MKV files on your own hard drive and piracy in general is the answer.
This goes back to the classic backup calculation. Never spend more to protect the data than the data is worth, right? That means the husband will be right or wrong on a user by user basis. If you have room to keep binders and binders of DVDs in your house, you need to calculate - is that space worth it for the data on there? Me, personally, once I've seen a movie or a TV show I rarely watch it again. There are a few that I do repeat watch, enough that I have a backup of those movies or shows even though I can get it on my streaming subscription today. But I'm not keeping binders or DVDs because that data is not important enough for me to back up.
People tend to shit on Spotify (while still using it), but they did manage something that we all want: Access to (almost everything), for a nominal monthly fee.
We need the same, but for movies and tv shows. Globally. It's an economical problem that currently has a suboptimal solution.
I think the era of Spotify dominance and music availability is coming to an end. Not sure what the next stage is going to look like - but I personally just canceled my subscription after over a decade of using Spotify exclusively. There is a lot of music that has never been available on Spotify, plus some music is disappearing due to artists and labels realizing they are not making any money from Spotify streaming. Plus no lossless, plus the relentless upsell of podcasts and now audio books.
I would be fine subscribing to a specialized streaming music service, or two.
1. Their recommendations became unbearable. I love discovering music but Spotify is not the right service for that anymore. Daily playlists are just several of my favorite artists shuffled. Genre playlists are just several of my favorite artists shuffled. Track radio is just several of my favorite artists shuffled. “Best of techno” playlist? Floating Points and Four Tet - both artists I listen to a lot, but they are not techno, and are not “best techno” - a genre that spans decades.
I don’t know if they overfitted their models and at this point I don’t care.
2. I am fed up with the podcast and audio book push. Not interested in either, don’t want to see it anywhere.
There is a ton of stuff not on Spotify. It might align well with your tastes, but they are subject to licensing issues. I’m not even talking about live versions or sessions, but bog-standard albums.
But if they are not on spotify then where are they? I don't know anyone who buys CDs these days and torrent sites definitely don't pay artists anything.
Sometimes directly from the publisher. Anecdotal example, I like an album by a band Tap Tap. They were short lived and based out of the UK. US Spotify does not have that album, but I can purchase it from their publisher at the time (ironically named Stolen Records).
If only! Audible is like Amazon Prime Videos - selection of free access books and then, depending on how much you pay per month, one or two "premium" books. Of course most of the books you really want to listen to are "premium." So essentially, you get to rent one book for ~$15/month or two for ~$23/month.
I'm a very happy Apple Music subscriber, but I'm also 52 and so own thousands of CDs and hundreds of LPs.
I subscribed to AM for a possibly non-intuitive reason: for me, the "all you can eat" aspect is secondary. The driver was "stop syncing my phone." My library is too large to carry on my main computer, so the "music computer" had to be the one running iTunes and whatnot. Getting something new on there was a hassle, and couldn't be done on the move.
Moreover, while this scenario made sense to ME, my wife found it so off-putting that I discovered she was just not listening to music on her phone at all.
AM solved this problem pretty well. PLUS, AM has a feature where it will give you access via Apple Music to weird, indie, or out of print stuff in your library that might not exist in Apple Music's library.
A case in point is the 1990 Wendy & Lisa record Eroica. It's one of my favorites, and has always been part of my library -- it's even been re-ripped, because the first time I digitized it I only used 128Kbps MP3, and I wanted it at 256Kbps AAC. But it's also 100% not available via any streaming service because of rights issues of some kind.
YOU can't get it from Apple Music, but I can because Apple Music sees it in the library on my music server. That's pretty cool.
Interesting. Do you know if this extends to basically all digitized music regardless of the specifics of artist/label streaming preferences? Eg King Crimson’s catalog was never added to Spotify, if I link my ripped CDs to AM, would it make it available for me to stream on my phone?
I believe, yes. I have various live versions of albums that have been ripped from streams and radio, Apple tries to match them to their library to save space and then just lets you wifi sync them. Shows up right next to the other music in your library.
The feature is called iTunes Match- you can actually get it standalone from Apple Music (at least you could, not sure if they have changed anything recently,) but AM includes it:
I get the point the author is making but keeping all the DVDs also isn't the answer IMHO. At least it wasn't for me, it was just annoying to find a place to store it all, to move it when we moved country would have cost money for basically nothing of value.
I had a purge of pretty much all my physical media a bit over a decade ago. I had a little over 1000 DVDs and Blu-rays. Probably 200 VHS too. God knows how many CDs and tapes.
Rather than ditch them and say "I will just use streaming to watch/listen when I want to" which is very naive IMHO I ripped them all to hard disks and archived them to some LTO tapes I had. Granted not everyone has access to this kind of equipment but these days there are other options anyway. I don't use LTO anymore.
Today I have full access to my entire movie, music, photo, and software collection near instantly from my NAS. Some stuff isn't online (as in not powered up) as it would just be a waste of power but I can switch it on if I ever feel the need to watch something I haven't watched in two decades but don't want to delete forever :)
I have some redundancy via RAID as well as on site/offline duplication should something really go wrong. Plus I have an off site backup. It isn't actually as much space as you would think even for a pretty huge number of movies as old stuff is pretty small. It is only recently with 4K HDR movies that we are looking at ~90GB for some movies. Storage isn't very expensive these days. When I did a quick comparison a while back I worked out it was less for the HDDs than it was to ship them all from one country to another let alone the non-quantifiable cost of my time packing, moving, unpacking, and physical storage space.
Ideally I would share the cost with others as it is kinda stupid for there to be multiple copies of the same movies and TV shows for no reason but sadly there isn't a solution for this and with the copyright laws and all that it is unlikely there ever will be something as reliable as doing it yourself.
I recently migrated my disc collection from cases. Initially I got binder pages like you linked, but I returned them and got paper sleeves instead, because (1) paper cases are cheaper and more compact, and (2) when I put discs in binders, they rub against the (admittedly soft) backing material, whereas when I put them in paper sleeves, I naturally hold the sleeve such that the discs don’t rub the sleeve when being inserted, and that seems a bit safer.
I do still use a binder for the papers from the cases.
That is a good compromise however most people I know that collect physical media like to keep the whole package not just the disc in a wallet like that. It is a good alternative to mine though and a lot cheaper :D
Does is bother anyone else that a column named "future tense" has story titles, none of which seem to be in the future tense? Talk about bait and switch . . .
Similar to music whether steamed or downloads to your device, the issues are similar for kindle books that you think you’ve purchased and owned at anytime but that can also disappear at any time.
And this is why I've rebuilt my digital music, tv, and movie collections. For the media I care about, I want to own it, not license it, thank you very much.
When streaming first came out I ended this practice. Then, the licensing disputes started and content started moving or disappearing. That's a trust they won't earn back.
I recently went through this. Every TV channel having a streaming service is just nuts.
Particularly flagrant is the likes of Disney, who owns Hulu, Disney+, ESPN+ and will happily sell subscriptions to all 3 + addons throughout.
Also abhorrent is the fact that these slimy companies are constantly moving content around the services, trying to get you subscribe to everything under the sun just to follow a favorite TV show. "Oh, it's on amazon, now netflix, now hulu, now disney+, now paramount+, now peacock, now britbox, now acorn"
427 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 276 ms ] threadWhen I moved I compressed my CD collection down from their hard cases to soft cases and kept all the inserts in one of the old hard-case bags minus the hard case plastic holders and I have no regrets.
I assume there may be a similar risk in renting e-Books online vs. having a non-DRM copy of it.
I was just thinking of doing the same for my collection in the attic, assuming the CDs have survived a couple thousand freeze/thaw cycles. :)
I like the idea of ditching the hard cases for space.
You get the benefits of both physical media, and convenience of soft storage availability. That music is mine, and can never be sold to me again.
In case some might be wondering what the "benefits" of physical media are; it's my belief that having to _commit_ to listening to a CD (not being able to flick through different albums and artists easily on Spotify, as the whim comes) is psychologically sound, and the alternative is damaging.
This goes for films too. Those old enough to remember renting DVDs — or even VHS! — may remember the excitement of getting that film back to their place to watch. The whole thing was an experience, and whether the film was good or bad, you had a good time with whoever you were with, because you had an _experience_. More often than not though, you enjoyed the film, because you wanted to. You invested, so it was worth more to you.
Actually this is more than "my belief", but I can't be bothered to find the research.
I thought by now I’d be doing the same thing with movies, but obviously that hasn’t happened.
The other thing about music is it has a far higher re-play value than Film/TV... some specific albums I've listened to thousands of times, and there is simply no way I would rely on some streaming service for that. I'm not sure what the younger generations do for their favourites... or maybe it's not like that any-more, maybe their music is more ephemeral and "trending". Pretty much all of my music with replay value is from way before 2000, back to 80s - I'm not even that old.
Many people think the best sounding DACs are the multibit jobbers from Philips which haven't even been made in thirty+ years.
Welcome to my Ted Talk…
They would have to outlaw personal computing, and not allow you to build your own servers with no firmware-enforced filtering, which given the current direction, is not particularly farfetched, but at that point battle is lost anyway and your DVD rips are the least of your problems.
There are multiple productions on YouTube, such as: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuL7EbjFBBw
Description on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Burns,_a_Post-Electric_Pla...
Michael W. Smith tells about being in the studio, and not being able to get something to sound right. He went back to listen to an old work tape, and realized "OK, nobody should be playing but the piano. That's what's wrong right now in the studio." If that's what you do, keep it all, even the "in process" stuff.
But as I said, stuff you watched is different from stuff you made.
And furthermore I find it mind-blowing that this is an unpopular opinion, especially on HN.
0, https://savestarwars.com/images/goutboxes.jpg
If you're trying to move some readers to start doing that, you'll probably need to engage with their reasons.
I damn sure don't want to go to the hassle of downloading a VHS transfer
Not everything needs to be pixel-perfect.
you kids with your universal formats; we used to have to make camera copies to watch PAL shows on NTSC...
"Good" times.
If it's something old without a DVD/BluRay release these will usually be a WEBRip (literally a screen recording of DRM'd content) or a WEB-DL (someone has cracked the DRM, or it was DRM free).
You'll only find VHS rips on highly specialized trackers (usually).
How do you "back up" a CD/DVD?
DVDs contain a proper filesystem, so you can just mount and copy that.
Once you have things onto your filesystem, the usual rules of backups apply.
which would include keeping the original disc ripped to make this new copy that needs backing up. more than one copy. more than one format. more than one location.
For DVDs you can use the infamous DVD Decrypter to make ISO files https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_Decrypter
or MakeMKV which straight copies the MPEG2 files (.vob) into a nice MKV container https://www.makemkv.com/
The importance of that type of redundancy depends on the viewing habits of a particular person. In the case of my friend, the "don’t actually use our DVDs all that often" really was "never re-watched the DVDs she owned". She had a DVD collection with all the X-Files seasons, James Bond movies, etc.
But she inadvertently learned her true viewing habits when Amazon Prime included video streaming for free. She realized she always preferred watching something new on Amazon rather than play an old X-Files DVD.
But what if Netflix and Amazon Prime Video lets their streaming licenses expire for "X-Files" and it's no longer available? Wouldn't that make the X-Files DVDs a great backup?!? It would, if she actually re-watched the X-Files -- but she never did. Owning DVDs was a waste of money for her particular viewing preferences (new stuff instead of reruns) and she was happy to get rid of the clutter.
The problem is that the future is uncertain. It's always possible that she might want to rewatch the X-Files at some point, even if she never actually does.
True, although …
"Difficulty discarding possessions is characterized by a perceived need to save items and distress associated with discarding them. Accumulation of possessions can result in living spaces becoming cluttered to the point that their use or safety is compromised. Compulsive hoarding is recognized by the eleventh revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th edition (DSM-5)."
It’s healthy to hang onto a few ratty t-shirts because you might need them to mow the lawn or because they remind you of good times; you can even be a bit bummed when you eventually do throw them out. It’s compulsive hoarding when you do it even though it seriously bothers you or turns your place into a death trap.
I don't own many DVDs, but when I see them in my bookshelf they remind of the story the tell, the context when I watched them, and my theories about society, sci-fi, and utopias that those movies inspired.
With books it's even more extreme. I get the physical copy sometimes more to have a physical representation of an idea than to read the book.
I also have books I've suddenly taken down to reference 20+ years after I read it, and where the text was not online, so I also like to have physical copies of books where the idea mattered because I know that some day I'll want to pass that idea on and will need a refresher.
Rip the DVDs, keep the digital copies somewhere safe, and discard the physical discs.
If you want to ensure that this remains safe, you'll need to both back up and periodically transfer the digital copies to new physical storage devices (in my case, I just upgraded from the ~4-yr-old 4TB HDD that was holding all my media to a new 16TB HDD). This is, however, kind of a necessity in any case; especially for burned DVDs, for instance of home movies, ripping them and storing the media fully digitally with a plan for long-term archival will have much better longevity. Even pressed DVDs don't last forever (especially if they are used sometimes—scratches happen!), and burned DVDs can have a lifetime of less than 5 years in some cases.
Data, however, if properly treated, can be perfectly saved forever. (Well, barring cosmic ray bit-flips, I guess.)
So if I just kept the DVDs, any time I wanted to watch something on one, I would have to:
1) Physically go to where the DVDs are
2) Locate the specific DVD I'm looking for (can be tricky if I'm looking for a specific episode of a show—I might not always remember what season it's from, and the Plex interface makes it pretty easy to scan through)
3) Get the DVD out
4) Go to the living room, where the DVD player is
5) Take exclusive control of the living room, and also bind myself to being there, for the duration of watching it
6) Put it all back when I'm done
So yes: for simple storage, as long as the DVDs you have will last the length of time you want to keep them, and you have enough physical space to keep them in comfortably, just keeping the DVDs is easier. But for actually using them on a regular basis, for places with less available space, for people who expect to be moving frequently (or just soon), and for collections where the longevity of the physical media is in doubt, digitizing is a better way to go.
Also note that page is referencing releases of Ubuntu from 2008. Maybe take it's information with a pinch of salt.
For a purely Linux way (as you linked to an Ubuntu Page) this[2] is a reasonable guide (giving it a quick skim) using MakeMKV. This should also work on Windows. (Ignore the Haandbrake steps here).
If you're on Windows (or know how to setup a VM with USB passthru for the Bluray drive) and don't mind paying for a license AnyDVD HD[2] is very good.
Both of the above will strip the DRM and leave you with the raw files from the disk (AnyDVDHD also gives the option to make an ISO). You can keep there as a 1:1 backup of the disk or you can further refine.
Without going to a massive rabbit hole and reproducing some (unfortunately private) guides verbatim you have 3 main things you can do from here if you don't want the raw source files.
1. Straight Remuxing: Take the video/audio as is from the `m2ts` container and stick it in an MKV, this won't save you any real space but makes archiving the film alone easier, you'll save some space from extras etc. by deleting the raw source files here. Takes about as long as a copy operation would. You can do this with ffmpeg on the cli in a single command.
2. Audio transcode remuxing. Take the raw video, transcode the audio to something smaller. You use a bunch of tools to strip the Audio[4][5], then transcode it using eac3to, then remux everything[6]. Realistically you've saving maybe a gig here if you're just transcoding the main audio track and dumping the rest. Some time spend recompressing the audio, then remuxing maybe an hour once you know what you're doing. This is usually what you'll see as a "Remux" on the high seas.
3. Compress Audio/Video: This is where you'd use something like Handbrake[7] to recompress the video, you can use the presets and get a watchable file but not the best quality but usually a significant size reduction. You can also tweak a lot of knobs here for excellent quality with little to no visual fidelity loss (a transparent encode) but this will take a lot of time. If you're using a preset you're probably looking at roughly the film's length encoding (more with slower processors). This is usually what you'll see tagged as a "BluRay" release on the high seas.
Obviously this is all for backing up your legitimately owned media in jurisdictions which allow it.
1. https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=19634 2. https://www.howtogeek.com/161498/HOW-TO-BACKUP-YOUR-DVD-AND-... 3. https://www.redfox.bz/en/anydvdhd.html 4. https://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=125966 5. http://haali.net/mkv/ 6. https://mkvtoolnix.download/ 7. https://handbrake.fr/
1. Bluray drives are becoming increasingly rare. Few people are buying them (because many stream) which is slowly killing the market.
2. Blurays tend to be much more finichy with read errors (unfortunately). A little dust or a bad pressed disk and the entire episode is lost :(
3. Blurays aren't being produced. Sure, you can get bluray movies still, but for tv series it's becoming REALLY rare for a bluray to be produced. Funnily, you'll often find DVDs for tv series before blurays (even for brand new shows).
... but it never has.
I converted them to mid quality mp4s so can keep a copy on a 512gb usb flash drive so I can take my movie collection anywhere I travel.
Donate to the library at least.
> burned DVDs can have a lifetime of less than 5 years in some cases.
My CD-Rs from '97 are in fine shape, thanks.
I had some from around the same time that were becoming unreadable by the mid-2000s.
The point is, you can't count on them lasting unless you specifically go out and buy the archival type.
And if you're not reading them regularly, then you'll only find out they've gone bad when it's already too late.
There is a reason why transferring backups to new media is done on the regular by professionals. They know that the only way to make sure the copies are good is to ... well, make copies.
One of my old photo/video backups is on 100GB Verbatim Bluray. Don't know about these in the future so I did a parity scan on each of them so errors can be fixed if need be. Also on external HD. Let's check in, in twenty years.
https://imgur.com/a/I7fokrx
I'd rip them and put them on new hard disks from time to time. AFAIK, that's the best long-term storage strategy for most people.
My wife loves Harry Potter.
So we got these ripped. We ditched her DVD collection after ripping everything. Legal copies, saving space. Don't even think we brought them to some second hand store.
Circumvention clause of the DMCA probably makes DVD rips illegal in the US, even if you keep your original copy and don’t otherwise violate copyright law.
My US ex did the same. She'd rent Netflix DVDs, rip them, and bring them back. Tho that was a long time ago as Netflix DVDs suggests (2005).
Furthermore, I do not feel morally bad about the practice, and the chance of getting into legal trouble with such (if it were illegal) is so small that I simply wouldn't care. You'd have to face a civil court, and how would any party know about your collection if you keep it private?
In terms of cost, it wasn't a waste of money to me: I spent the money to watch them that once. With a few exceptions I never bought with the expectation of rewatching in mind. That was a nice bonus. And now I have an archival copy, and while there are many I haven't rewatched, there are are plenty I have, and some I've rewatched many times, and it wasn't always predictable ahead of time. There are series I loved a lot I never rewatched, and movies I didn't know I'd like that I've rewatched half a dozen times.
These days, I don't buy if it's something really mainstream, but I still buy if it's a bit more niche and something I consider might not always remain available. Quite a lot of the DVD's I have are of things that are not available on the streaming services I have.
But separate to all of this, even for a lot of the movies people might never watch again, don't underestimate the value of that feeling of comfort to a lot of people, and the value of the physical artefact as a memento.
I think people continue seeding torrents for longer than DVDs reliably last.
Feels dodgy, always a hassle trying to fight your way through all the scams and malware and porn and when you get the movie it's of questionable quality.
If I buy a DVD then I get perfect quality in a nice case in a day or two without having to visit the seedy red light district of the Internet only to get dud contraband.
It does take a but of time to spot fakes, and you need to give the community time to aggregate good content and weed out the fakes, but it's definitely not the experience you describe. It sounds like you last tried a decade or two ago.
Oh, that's easy! You want to see <movie>, so you search for "<movie> 1080p" (or better) and after a few minutes you have it on your PC and can watch it 1,000 of times if you want; even when offline (!). It's also free. This is why people like pirate movies.
>in a day or two ...
LOL
But somehow if I pirate that, i cause them 'damage'.
Luckily on most sites, pirated videos have keywords in filename (720p, 1080p, 4k,... x264, x265,... ) so you can see the quality and choose what filetype you want/need.
Its actually really easy, it only takes seconds to get the right torrent going. I've never accidentally torrented anything I didn't intend to.
I'll buy the bluray/dvd, then download the torrent for the movie to put into Plex. Like a backup, but MUCH better and easier on the size than I would be able to do myself.
Takes about 1.5 hours to set up - you now have a Netflix-like UI with an easy option of requesting TV Shows and Movies from a nice UX.
You can get any media in any quality you want, without ever stepping into any red light district.
[0] https://sonarr.tv/ [1] https://radarr.video/ [2] https://jellyfin.org/
ps: I just bought a dvd from CL
I wrote a Python app that runs on a Raspberry Pi that continually plays the content that I have accrued. Some of the content I schedule, other content is random.
It just runs on a downstairs TV. I enjoy accidentally catching some old film, or a musical or something I pulled down from YouTube of a guy making furniture....
This has been such an ever enmissserating situation. Started as a high & mighty &bgood convenience, but we're ending up worse than where we started; fragmented & ephemeral.
I'm reading the "so awful" within the context of this thread more of an accusation for someone making the decision to not allow content vs I just wish it were on DVD for my convenience. It's not all conspiracy theories. Sometimes, it's just financial. Some older content was done on such a cheap budget and companies that we'll just call fly by night. These types of places might not be able to remaster their content for blu-ray either because they no longer exist, don't have the funding to re-transfer the film to a higher scan, or just physically no longer have the materials.
For example, one could make the argument that Alfred Hitchcock's entire library promotes negative stereotypes of women - and it's true, women in Hitchcock films are not the strong types, they're more often helpless victims who have to be rescued by male characters. This clearly, one could say, promotes negative female stereotypes which are damaging to young women so all those movies should be removed from streaming services.
One could continue in this manner, selectively pulling anime movies because they promote excessive violence and sexuality to a teenage audience, or war movies like Apocalypse Now and Dr Strangelove that portray military generals as clueless maniacs, or if the pendulum swings back to the social conservative end, pulling all horror movies that don't portray Christianity in a positive light or have too many Satanic themes, and on and on.
Keeping hard copies in your personal possession is one way around this, but since the copyrights and hence distribution rights are held by these conglomerates that don't want to get in trouble with some political group or other by making them available, nobody else can view them without going through pirate sites - a very unfortunate situation.
They already do this frequently. 4chan has been tracking it for ages now.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6677266/
If you feel that this is incorrect, go to Wiki and try to edit Rachel Levine's entry to remove the word female and you can personally see how the community views this.
With regard to female sexual health panels this also appears to be a fabrication. I googled this and your comment was one of the first results, unless you mean the NowThis News panel with Biden? That being a progressive news org having a media moment with the president, not a female sexual health panel as you've called it.
Your last point is complete non-sequitur. You're operating from a place of discomfort and then working backwards toward rationalisation, that's much is clear from the half-truths you're telling. If there were any concrete concerns beyond your personal feelings you wouldn't feel the need to lie.
But yes, I did have the names wrong. The White House's Lesbian day of Visibility was with Richard Levine and Charles Clymer, the two male "lesbian females" at the table. https://ovarit.com/o/GenderCritical/90533/tims-charles-charl...
This is Dylan Mulvaney who met Biden https://ovarit.com/o/GenderCritical/94756/disgustingly-shall...
Thanks for the correction.
> With regard to female sexual health panels this also appears to be a fabrication.
"Rachel" Levine is the assistant health minister so that's every day for them.
> Dylan says she has tampons for other women, in separate other videos she talks about changes to her body.
"Her" body. Exactly.
> You're operating from a place of discomfort and then working backwards toward rationalisation,
It is very uncomfortable watching women being beaten https://www.gulf-insider.com/us-transgender-activists-attack... simply for asserting their rights to single-sex spaces.
I am very uncomfortable watching institutions that my daughter appreciated, such as girl guiding, being appropriated by crazy gun-toting men https://www.womenarehuman.com/women-interviewed-by-police-fo... and for the women who complain to be targeted by false reports and doxing.
I'm horrified watching politicians give women's identities and rights away to men if they claim to be women https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/feb/01/labour-to-c...
I would be as uncomfortable watching Rachel Dolezal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Dolezal being appointed presidential advisor for Black affairs.
https://orwh.od.nih.gov/sex-gender
It’s a good example how selective presentation of scientific realities can be abused to mislead.
Chromosomal defects in a binary system don’t constitute a new or between-state, and it also isn’t commonly described that way: XXY (Kleinfeltner) affecting males is the mainstream position.
Using accurate information? Not ignoring the complexities of the world?
That comment is absolutely correct; to make things more confusing, people whose sex appears female can turn out to have XY allosomes in some, or all[0], of their cells.
0: https://www.invitra.com/en/morris-syndrome/
It doesn’t state anywhere that the patients are either female or belong to a novel category.
Chromosomal abnormalities would be the modern term, it applies to both sexual as well as other chromosomal abnormalities like Down.
But to answer the question as asked: Yes, it fulfills the definition of the older term.
In humans syndromes that lead to ambiguous (“intersex”) presentation and/or chromosomes are still operating in a binary system, eh Klinefelter affects boys.
The same is true for (very) rare hermaphroditism: in this case both gametes could in theory be produced, in practice though individuals are sterile.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex
Modern aircraft still have ashtrays in the washrooms because they’d much prefer that somebody choosing to sneak a smoke puts their cigarette somewhere other than the washroom trash bin where there’s a history of them starting fires.
I took a cross-country Amtrak trip right before the pandemic, and most of the conductor's announcements were just to tell us when the next smoke break would be.
When the train got stuck waiting for cross traffic at a freight yard in rural North Dakota, an incipient passenger mutiny forced them to break the rules and let everyone pop out for some light trespassing and nicotine consumption.
It felt strange in a similar, but opposite way to what you're describing.
The other three cases were all wars - an apples to oranges comparison.
Remember the Chinese military had no problem mowing down protestors if their bosses give the order.
That said, it is easier and safer to defend yourself from a government in modern society with information and free uncensored communication than with guns.
You seem to be completely off-base.
No, in the United States, the military and all federal employees explicitly swear an oath to the Constitution, and are forbidden from executing illegal orders, regardless of the chain of command.
Yeah, PLA goons in Communist China certainly do things differently.
In the United States, the people are the government. Where are you?
Also note all the leaked footage of our military gleefully mowing down children and keeping score. They are never prosecuted for war crimes either. Just part of the job.
That is how humans work everywhere. The US is not special.
Yeah, you've never been in the military and appear to have a knowledge based on memes of it. Read the officer's oath and see what we're trained to do.
And of course we have public libraries with all kinds of good media.
I don't think the comment your replying to is even talking about public libraries. I believe they're saying if society determines a person is cancelled and it's on a streaming service, it can instantly disappear from most streaming media.
Most public libraries don't have the resources to archive materials. That's mostly down to academic and specialist libraries, and the library of congress.
That was the result of a specific deal Twitter made early on (itself a marketing stunt, of sorts). It doesn't mean the Library of Congress is generally in the business of archiving DRM-ed media on streaming services.
Also, the person above could have been talking about compared to days past. I can tell you the libraries I had access to when and where I grew are less funded (many closed), but again depends on where and what you’re comparing against.
The US is reportedly 62nd in the world in libraries per capita. [1] Given the US has more wealth per capita than most of the world as well, I think claiming we underfund our public library system is fairly obvious.
[1] https://onlinegrad.syracuse.edu/blog/best-countries-book-lov...
This is only the case if you think the proper level of funding is a function of population size or wealth instead of whatever is required to obtain sufficient results. If you're looking for results, it seems the proper level of funding would actually scale with population density (sparser areas require higher funding per capita to provide the same access).
I think you can make a case for that sort of model, but I don't think it's "fairly obvious".
I’m in Illinois; under state law libraries exist as independent taxing bodies - the only way to underfund or otherwise interfere with them is at the ballot box, and it would take years of concerted effort by at least 60% of the local population (indicating that this is really what they want).
I have some family in Indiana; their libraries are funded and controlled at the county level to maximize what they can do cost-wise and to ensure that rural farmers also have access to all the resources. That structure also makes it much harder for goofballs to interfere.
The TV show Community is missing an episode on Netflix for some reason (edit: reason was Ken Jeong in what could be interpreted as blackface).
The IT Crowd is missing one in some geos because it was considered anti-Trans by some - that episode also has the unrelated and hilarious plot where Roy and Moss convince Jen that they're loaning her a "black box that holds the entire internet".
I'm not the type to rail against such things generally, but IMO it was unnecessary and misguided to remove these episodes: their humor came deliberately from how oblivious Dee was to the offensiveness of her act.
Indeed, her portrayals are usually immediately and explicitly critiqued by her fellow characters as being racist and insane.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/IASIP/comments/hflb6t/list_of_its_a...
> After the series' release, a study published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry found that suicide among teenagers rose by 28.9% in the month after Netflix launched the show.
A few additional concerns with the paper:
-The authors made no effort to try and determine if any of the people who died had seen the show, or even had heard of it.
-Suicides were up the month before the show was released as well.
-In fact, suicides in that age group had been trending up for years according to their data, which is not mentioned in the discussion of results at all.
> inviting laughter and derision toward the... community
No. Just finding an occasion for the selected direction in creativity. Which the writer of the article seems to want to make ideological, with the exception of one use of the expression "«cheap laugh»" (which, for that matter, may bring attention to the other "celebrated" subplot of "the elders of the Internet" - using the same perspective, it would be as if "making cheap laughs through a sort of "ableism"").
It's a mean spirited gag, and the mere fact of being transgender is the punch line, over and over. It sucks. It makes revisiting the show more cringey and less fun.
The whole episode is about the clumsiness of living, consistently with the project idea ("the IT crowd", outcast specialists with little interface to the public, which is a mass of people thrown into some role "«not doing much work but constantly having affairs»" - confused humans -, with a link which is the portrait of incompetence trying to make a living - trying to live - into something she does not understand). All the characters do is "attempting", trying to fit a role. The difficulties of living roles could be a trigger for the development of the substory involving Douglas Reynholm and April (and the gender instrumental to that). The whole idea climaxes in the "collapse of civilization" when the "stakeholders", as "topmost layer of the role-players", are in front of the catastrophic loss of the Internet, and the "punchline from above" is that of Moss: «It really isn't that funny» - of course, because it is tragic.
While I could see that the "It's over" scene could be to some extent insensitive, given that the writers may have supposed that it would be something lived by a number in such group, it was instrumental to the fight scene, which is a consolidated topos. And the "victory" seems to be on the other side, since the "punchline from inside" is that of Douglas, which ends the episode crying, going "It's not the same!" (It's not the same without her, or him - as she was both the "other half" and the "pal"). So, not only I do not see a phobia, but on the contrary, I see the opposite message, towards seeing people for what they are, and to love that whatever they are (also since the premise of the whole is, as said, that they will be confused imperfect players) - Douglas could not and he is alone crying.
> Whether a show came out in 1955 or 1999, I just enjoy it as a product of it's time.
This is great when one can do it, and I think it's a fine approach. But of course, if you were gay in 1955 or trans in 1999, there's probably a lot of shows where certain issues— common enough at the time— would have really diminished your enjoyment and maybe even triggered some dysphoria, even 'at the time'.
with censorship nobody can watch it.
Now... I will admit, it isn't always wrong (CP). But it often is the fruit of an unwitting narcissism.
"I mean", as if Douglas Reynholm (the "phobic" - finally, a literal case - in the episode) was drawn as an exemplary character, a model of a human being... "I mean II", I checked on a search engine for the spelling of the surname, and the first under-link stub that resulted is «Douglas Reynholm was an incredibly arrogant, self-righteous, pompous, cruel and elitist egomaniac who considered himself to be somewhat above everybody else. He viewed women as objects to feel and manipulate to his incredible sexual mania»...
--
Edit: Furthermore. As "everyone" knows, Graham was a humble watchman in the hospital where Dr. Rick Dagless worked (the "Darkplace"), and probably does not even speak TCP today. So, when he wrote the scene of the people who believe they have in front of them "the Internet" - like the one called "«stupid cow»" by an adlibber because she did not realize "the internet is weightless" (and so also must be "the box which is the Internet" in the scene) -, when he wrote that, did he mean to diminish and elicit contempt for all the non technically inclined, probably including himself?
60s cartoons are contraband. Stupid.
Do we know who actually pulled the content? Netflix clearly doesn't have a policy against streaming partial amount of content when they can't get it all from a provider but it's not clear to me if Netflix pulled a single episode of Community or if the licensers maybe refused to license that episode. I think I read that Sony was supportive of the episode being pulled.
I think most of this content will come back once the industry as a whole sort of figures out the positioning. There are something the creators are embarrassed by and it might never come back but I expect there to be a new rating or something similar (Disney+ does this already) where they'll indicate before the media plays that it may be offensive or insensitive. News shows do this when covering certain types of crimes.
Some smart-ass comic gets up on the stage and leads with "I always said you were the two talented ones in the family."
Ouch. And double-ouch at the big laugh it got from the audience.
I have a lot of mixed feelings about this one; though I don't think the ep should be removed, it is in poor taste and arguably defeats its own comic intentions. I suspect the deeper objection is not to the content per se but how it reads in the context of Graham Linehan subsequently aligning himself as a massive transphobe and making it into a political cause.
I don't know Linehan personally, but grew up near him and followed his career since long before he went into television, when he was writing film and TV reviews in an alt-weekly paper for beer money. He has always been a comic genius, able to turn excruciating social pain into hilarious farce, while also being willing to cheer on success. I remember he once opened a movie review for a film called Eat the Peach with 'At last, an Irish movie that does not make me want to run to the toilets and lick all four walls.'
That kind of self-criticality and emotional nakedness has deep roots in the Irish identity, and it is what makes Roy, an Irish man working for an incomprehensible and irrational corporation in London, such a compelling character. I find the show especially entertaining because I've been that person, doing that exact job, working for those kind of companies in London, often under bosses like Jen or Denholm/Douglas Reynholm. Linehan's character portraits, even for a single episode or scene, are incredibly sharp and truthful. In The Work Outing, where Roy and Moss unwillingly accompany Jen to the theater, there's a scene where Jerome, an extroverted PR guy, is introduced to Roy & Moss. No sooner has Roy diffidently said hello than Jerome exclaims 'Oh my god you're Irish! I love Irish people! They're all mad aren't they! They're just mad!' and the exchange spirals downward into cringe. The whole episode is a comic masterpiece, but this brief scene has a special place in my heart as I've had that conversation hundreds of times in my life.
In this scene but also in general, the engine of comedy is the mismatch between characters who are quirky and self-conscious (like Roy and Jen) and those who are quirky but oblivious (like Moss, Douglas Reynholm, and here, Jerome). When characters go against their 'natural' type they get punished in hilarious ways, by being stuck with the baggage of their transgression which then multiplies itself exponentially. The plot frame for this episode is that Jen tries to be oblivious in pursuit of a date with another oblivious-seeming person, who turns out to be even more painfully self-aware than she is. As in all restorative comedies, the characters who transgress end up feeling worse but wiser, nothing really bad happens, and everything returns to normal.
In The Speech (the 'banned' episode), hopelessly insensitive CEO Douglas Reynholm meets an attractive lady journalist, April, and romance blossoms. Despite her repeated advisories that she used to be a man, Douglas thinks he's found the perfect woman who not just tolerates but admires and enjoys his shallow hyper-masculinity, sharing and even exceeding his love of bad action movies, heavy drinking, and competitive sports. But gradually reality gets through even his dense skull and he ends the relationship - briefly taking responsibility for the situation, before reverting to type and deflecting blame back onto April. Mutual recriminations quickly escalate into a fist fight straight out of a bad action movie, with Douglas wins - thereby regaining his 'boss' status - by knocking April out. He is subsequently shown as being vilified in the press and sobbing over the loss of his erstwhile companion, with whom he was actually compatible.
(Roy, Moss, and Jen are relegated to the less-important plot frame story in this episode, which sets up but is peripheral to the emotional conflict of the main story. In dramati...
Curiously, in doing so, Linehan chanced upon an actual civil rights movement, of women losing single-sex spaces to males who choose to identify as women, and started championing this instead.
Though, many gender critical feminists find Graham's unasked-for presence in their activism rather embarrassing and irritating due to his generally quite aggressive behavior and his occasional bouts of sexism.
I read an article a while back about how old Friends episodes have movie posters in the background of films which were released after 2010.
Can't find any evidence of this at all.
Will see if I can find it. Indeed it is not easily dug up.
There are many ads about the coming trend of "Virtual Product Placement" but none that I can find which acknowledge the early attempts at it which I read about way back.
https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/iiay9/digitally_inser...
https://www.outsourcemarketing.com/blog/help-product-placeme...
https://gizmodo.com/digital-ads-streaming-netflix-amazon-nbc...
For another thing, there is also at least some element here of the right to be forgotten. It's obviously different for groups vs individuals but our systems should allow some amount of agency to people who regret things they have produced in the past and wish for them to be forgotten.
I see such rewriting of the past, or at least attempts of that, on Wikipedia. It's not really hidden as there is a (hopefully!) integer edit history, but who reads the edit history anyway? Usually you just look at articles as they are at the current moment.
As we don't have much "hard copies" of a lot of stuff any more around the possibility to "rewrite the past" for significant amounts of people becomes a real thread as we rely more and more on digital and purely online data.
Given how "durable" our digital data is future historians will have a very hard time. Maybe our time will become a dark age when seen form the future. Have you tried lately to open some files from the 80'es that reside on some storage medium form that time? And that's only a few years in the past. Imagine 500 yeas in the future. What will be left of all the cat videos on YouTube (and maybe some more important data)?
Every time I look at a controversial article, and I'm unconvinced by the implicit narratives, I will look at the history, and more often than not there are interesting details lurking in the past versions.
And sometimes it's just fascinating looking at how details on a situation unrolled over time. Like for instance, go look at Jeffrey Epstein's Wikipedia history: there was an article on him preceding the publicity of his abuse.
I am under the impression right now that Wikipedia history is quite permanent unless an article is totally deleted, and that people do not prune the history of content they wish to censor. I hope it remains this way, cynically I don't think this will always be so, prove me wrong Wikipedia!
One person's collection serves that one person, but there are some really cool groups out there like DocuWiki[0] that try to archive every documentary out there and serve them on the eDonkey network. There's been numerous times I've failed to find a documentary by even the original publisher. Like I literally couldn't give them my money no matter how much I tried. And even libraries didn't have it. But good old DocuWiki always had my back
Torrents are kind of like a community archive
[0] https://docuwiki.net/index.php?title=Special:Newpages
You should have to go to a Kellog's store or a Quaker store depending what you want to eat next week.
At least, that's what studios and labels think.
We live in pretty much the golden age of content where more is produced than ever before and more is being spent on it than ever before I cannot see how what you're proposing doesn't end up with a decline in both of those things because there would no longer be competition in content.
That said, if they could shift 1080 BDs down to DVD pricing and UHD BD down to what BD costs now I would buy a lot more. I’m starting to build up a collection of UHD Blu-rays but Jesus, £20-30 per movie really adds up. Definitely paying the enthusiast tax there.
I always am wondering if I’ll regret it in 10 years when you may be able to stream super high bitrates, but as always, the future is uncertain anyways.
Like you or not, MKV files on your own hard drive and piracy in general is the answer.
We need the same, but for movies and tv shows. Globally. It's an economical problem that currently has a suboptimal solution.
I would be fine subscribing to a specialized streaming music service, or two.
1. Their recommendations became unbearable. I love discovering music but Spotify is not the right service for that anymore. Daily playlists are just several of my favorite artists shuffled. Genre playlists are just several of my favorite artists shuffled. Track radio is just several of my favorite artists shuffled. “Best of techno” playlist? Floating Points and Four Tet - both artists I listen to a lot, but they are not techno, and are not “best techno” - a genre that spans decades.
I don’t know if they overfitted their models and at this point I don’t care.
2. I am fed up with the podcast and audio book push. Not interested in either, don’t want to see it anywhere.
And another thing - I've discovered lots of artists through Spotify and Youtube. If they weren't there - I would't even know that they existed.
And audiobooks! Audible is stupid.
IOW - stupid.
I subscribed to AM for a possibly non-intuitive reason: for me, the "all you can eat" aspect is secondary. The driver was "stop syncing my phone." My library is too large to carry on my main computer, so the "music computer" had to be the one running iTunes and whatnot. Getting something new on there was a hassle, and couldn't be done on the move.
Moreover, while this scenario made sense to ME, my wife found it so off-putting that I discovered she was just not listening to music on her phone at all.
AM solved this problem pretty well. PLUS, AM has a feature where it will give you access via Apple Music to weird, indie, or out of print stuff in your library that might not exist in Apple Music's library.
A case in point is the 1990 Wendy & Lisa record Eroica. It's one of my favorites, and has always been part of my library -- it's even been re-ripped, because the first time I digitized it I only used 128Kbps MP3, and I wanted it at 256Kbps AAC. But it's also 100% not available via any streaming service because of rights issues of some kind.
YOU can't get it from Apple Music, but I can because Apple Music sees it in the library on my music server. That's pretty cool.
Links:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204146 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253762018#:~:text=Yes%2....
I had a purge of pretty much all my physical media a bit over a decade ago. I had a little over 1000 DVDs and Blu-rays. Probably 200 VHS too. God knows how many CDs and tapes.
Rather than ditch them and say "I will just use streaming to watch/listen when I want to" which is very naive IMHO I ripped them all to hard disks and archived them to some LTO tapes I had. Granted not everyone has access to this kind of equipment but these days there are other options anyway. I don't use LTO anymore.
Today I have full access to my entire movie, music, photo, and software collection near instantly from my NAS. Some stuff isn't online (as in not powered up) as it would just be a waste of power but I can switch it on if I ever feel the need to watch something I haven't watched in two decades but don't want to delete forever :)
I have some redundancy via RAID as well as on site/offline duplication should something really go wrong. Plus I have an off site backup. It isn't actually as much space as you would think even for a pretty huge number of movies as old stuff is pretty small. It is only recently with 4K HDR movies that we are looking at ~90GB for some movies. Storage isn't very expensive these days. When I did a quick comparison a while back I worked out it was less for the HDDs than it was to ship them all from one country to another let alone the non-quantifiable cost of my time packing, moving, unpacking, and physical storage space.
Ideally I would share the cost with others as it is kinda stupid for there to be multiple copies of the same movies and TV shows for no reason but sadly there isn't a solution for this and with the copyright laws and all that it is unlikely there ever will be something as reliable as doing it yourself.
I have ~1500 DVDs stored that way in less than a meter of shelf space.
I do still use a binder for the papers from the cases.
I rarely watch anything twice.
I have also found there are many things to occupy my time other than watching things I have already seen.
When streaming first came out I ended this practice. Then, the licensing disputes started and content started moving or disappearing. That's a trust they won't earn back.
Particularly flagrant is the likes of Disney, who owns Hulu, Disney+, ESPN+ and will happily sell subscriptions to all 3 + addons throughout.
Also abhorrent is the fact that these slimy companies are constantly moving content around the services, trying to get you subscribe to everything under the sun just to follow a favorite TV show. "Oh, it's on amazon, now netflix, now hulu, now disney+, now paramount+, now peacock, now britbox, now acorn"
DVDs are durable, but not immortal. I have several that have failed.
I appreciate the ask. Ripping DVDs is just a lot of work, time, storage, and fiddling. I don’t wish ripping 15 seasons of ER on anyone.
But, the truth is, the things break down.