This is why we have child labor laws. Thank a Union.
Oh god, I just aged several years in a single second, a friend of mine sent me a snippet from a fic that read someone put a VHS into a VCR and took so long getting back to it to press play that the menu screen had looped multiple times
every time I think maybe I am putting too much effort into researching the details of technological advances I lived through, something like this crosses my dash
For the young whippersnappers who don’t understand the issue, VHS tapes don’t have menu screens. That is not technologically possible on a tape.
A magnetic tape works because information has been magnetically encoded on the tape. The tape is very long, and is wound around two little spools, one at the end, one at the beginning. In the middle is a part where it is flat and there is a thing called a ‘head’ and it reads the magnetic encoding on the bit of the tape next to it and converting it into sound and/or images. When the tape plays, the little spools wind/unwind so that new sections of tape are constantly being run past the head. Every single thing a VCR can do is a function of controlling which part of the tape is next to the head.
You put the tape in the machine and press play on the machine, and it plays. You press stop and it stops. You press play again and it starts playing right where it left off, because while it’s stopped the tape is not moving past the head. You can pause it instead of stop it, which will leave the frame you paused on on the TV (in contrast to stopping, when the screen goes dark). You can fast forward, and it will wind the tape forward towards the end. You can rewind and it will wind the tape back to the beginning.
in my experience it usually played automatically on being fed a tape, and you had to pause or stop it to prevent this, which was awkward sometimes when the tv volume turned out to be set way too high
unless of course the tape hadn't been rewound before being taken out last time. then, unless auto-rewind was a feature of the VCR in question, you had to push that button first to get back to the start so the movie was watchable.
also if you wanted it to rewind quickly instead of playing the entire film backwards, silently, at maybe double speed, you pushed 'stop' first and it lifted the tape away from the reader to respool at speed.
Now that I have processed this somewhat, here's some other tidbits:
Tapes had no mandatory ads at the front. Oh, sure, there often were ads at the front, but there was no way to prevent just fast forwarding through them.
For the busy among us who wanted to watch a film while another was rewinding, separate tape rewinding devices were sold.
Tape rental places would ask you to "please be kind, rewind!" and some places charged a rewinding fee if you didn't.
Music was affected by the jump from tapes to disc, too! I remember it blowing my mind that CDs could replay a track instantly, instead of me having to memorize how long it took to rewind a tape to play back a tune.
Both VCRs and music tape players would occasionally break and "eat" the tape, which meant an unspooled, destroyed tape and having to take the player apart to free the tape from it. Sometimes the player could be fixed afterwards, and sometimes it couldn't.
Sometimes if you played the same portion of a tape over and over, it would lead to tape degradation: distorted video and audio, or even the tape snapping and having to get a new one. (I did this to at least one Disney movie - don't remember which - and one soundtrack.)
Adjusting the tracking! I don't remember how this physically works but if the video is jumping around, sometimes you would have to adjust it so the VCR reads the tape correctly. Looks like there's some how-to guides out there on the Internet on how to do this. Usually there was a button on the remote to do this.
Some VCRs were extra fancy and had digital clocks built into them. After a power outage, they would reset to 12:00 and flash. Adjusting the clock was a strange and mysterious process that a lot of folks never got the hang of, so their VCRs just had 12:00 flashing on them at all times.
If posting fic online has taught me anything, it’s that I have no idea how the reader will react to anything. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Not the faintest clue.
Fics that I think I scribbled off just to get them out there get the kindest, most rapturous feedback. Fics I slaved over, agonized over, bled my soul into get a couple tepid replies. Fics I thought were me revealing the darkness and weird kink that lives in my brain, scared to even post it for fear of judgement, get, “Aaaw that’s so sweet!” replies. Baffling.
My conclusion? You just never know. You really just can’t know. When I did a workshop with 20 other writers I would try to guess what their critique of my story would be and I was right maybe 1 in 20 times. Only one other writer would have the same critique for my story that I had. And it wasn’t even always the same person.
The encouraging part about this is, if self recrimination, the fear that you know what people won’t like about your story, is holding you back, just say fuck it! You’re almost certainly wrong! All you can do is make it the best story you can for the energy you have. And yeah, sometimes that means scribbling it out in an evening and kicking it out to the void of the internet before you can change your mind or worry about editing it more than once because then you’ll never post it.
It’s all chaos, man. You don’t get to decide what the audience thinks. All you can do is create it and put it out there for them to decide.
Surgeries and operations are being cancelled on the day of the queen’s funeral. These patients will have been on a waiting list for months if not years.
Everyone should be absolutely seething with rage.
ID: A tweet by @/slk_writes reading:
that’s me finally cried over the queen dying
not because i’m sad about her dying but because two people in a fibroids group i’m in have had their long awaited operations cancelled due to it being the day of her funeral
i am absolutely seething
/End ID
Please copy & edit this ID onto the original post
literally every day i say to myself “wow i’m having a really bad one today” like girl i think this is just your life.
reminds me of when some old church in Sweden was cleaning out their storage and they forgot they had left like 80 medieval corpses in some ikea bags during renovations so somebody opened a closet door and it’s just
A weighted blanket isn’t enough I need to be vacuum sealed
Someone do this to me
As a sex shop worker I have what could be either excellent or upsetting news
1. Google “cat” on mobile or desktop
2. Click/touch the paw icon
3. Now click/touch anywhere else
4. Hehehehe
He is helping 🤣
Weeping about this
The Forbidden Pool
Every so often a note will blow through my notifs telling me “Um actually the water is only radioactive at the bottom so it’s perfectly safe to swim here” yeah bitch swim in the reactor pool see if I fucking care
The bottom quote is from Randall Munroe’s What If? blog and later his book by the same name
yes, babe, you’re sick and twisted, will you come back to bed- what? yes, of course you’re evil and irredeemable. now can you please cuddle with me
“they/them pussy is-” whatever. they/them cock is like the blue potion. from zelda. they/them cock is like when you stand up too quickly and pass out for .0612 seconds and visit the machine elves and they teach you about 3-dimensional numbers
calling their cock seatbelt taste because i want to get strapped in and suck on it
these are actually really important tags because this is seriously what i was going for with the initial post. like yeah it’s jokey but it Did originate from a legit annoyance with how often “non-binary” is equated to “afab” and amab non-binary people are seen as Men Lite/innately predatory/etc. it’s just that i have a brain worm so instead of making an eloquently worded post expressing that, i made a post about passing out and seeing machine elves. but the underlying sentiment is genuine.
This might sound dystopian but this is actually really cool cremations are really bad for the environment so if we can make them eco friendly we’ll be able to do a lot of good
Plus it’s renewable because well people die every day
It's not 'throw another granny in the heat turbine to sell the electricity'
It's 'it takes 1,000-3,000°c / 1,830 - 2,370°f to cremate a person. We're using a lot of energy to get up and maintain those temperatures', this is recouping that energy
Woman, you can’t hide the best part in the tags:
exgynocraticgrrl-archive-deacti
[Note: When J. Elliot refers to her being classed as one of ‘your people’ in relation to black people of color, it’s based on her reputation of being an outspoken, anti-racism ally].
- Jane Elliot on the Oprah Winfrey Show panel on racism in 1992.
White people get deeply offended hearing black people speak this truth, so maybe hearing Jane Elliot say it will cut through the white fragility: White people’s default setting is racism. Because America’s default setting is racism. That doesn’t mean they cannot unlearn it, but anti-Blackness is so ubiquitous in Western culture that unlearning racism is not something that just magically happens because you think you’re a good person. It’s not something you attain and then forget about. It’s a perishable skill.
Nobody becomes “not racist” by repeatedly declaring “But hey, I’M not racist” on social media. Becoming “not racist” is defined by conscious choice, coupled with actions—like listening to black people, calling out racism, and not saying or doing racist things—that prove you aren’t racist. Being “not racist” is something that needs to be worked on CONSTANTLY.
I had a thought, but unfortunately I had a second thought. They ricocheted off each other and I can’t find either anymore
