I banished videotapes a few years ago, and [watching them again] instantly reminded me why: it’s a horrible format, at least by modern standards. (Hah! VHS tapes are now pre-modern.) You wait and you wait. You wait for the tape to get comfy; you wait for it to spin up. When you fast forward there’s an UNBEARABLE pause of perhaps one or two seconds while the machinery attempts to process your command. You always overshoot. You can never tell where you are in the tape –\u0080\u0093 the counter resets to zero when the tape’\u0080\u0099s put in, regardless of the actual position.<\/p>\n
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But oh, how modern it was. How remarkable. The ability to record a TV show and watch it at the time of your choosing changed everything. Now you could go out on the weekend, strike out at a bar, AND have Miami Vice waiting when you got home. Of course it led to piles of slickery ugly black videotapes, unlabelled, cluttering up the house. It lead to dark despair when you learned you had taped over something you’d meant to save. It meant buying a brick of tapes every other week — a fresh tape! Highest Sony quality! Man, I’m going to see every one of those 200 lines of resolution tonight. The picture has degraded on the tapes, of course, but not much; it was never that good to start with. But we were used to seeing the world through a glob of Vaseline. It was a tiny price to pay for fast-forwarding through the commercials.<\/p>\n
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So what am I doing now? Fast-forwarding through the shows, and recording the commercials.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Ah, yes, the commercials… commercials from the ’80s are sometimes more entertaining — or at least more evocative — than the programs they interrupted.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I love the DVD — the clarity of the image, the supplemental materials, and even the physical object itself. It’s such an elegant thing, a small, shiny silver disc that costs relatively little and takes takes up minimal space on my sagging, overloaded bookshelves. Even so, I was a late adopter of the format, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-556","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-ramblings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/556","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=556"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/556\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=556"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}