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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

True, but one leads to the other here. If they were getting crushed on the corporate level, they’d be forced to turn to the consumer market.

That’s a special sort of hell, Google sheets. As an accountant, it’s not up to snuff (although it’s ability to have multiple people in the doc at the same time, and it’s co-working abilities are wonderful). Gmail too is an especially epic absolute circle of hell, from a business user perspective.

The thing is, Microsoft Office is full of bugs that are 20+ years old at this point. If someone came along with an actual enterprise level business software suite that could be easily adapted and was quite similar to MOffice, especially Excel, I think Microsoft could be pretty easily crushed. As it is, they are high on their own farts, because there’s nobody forcing them to be otherwise. There’s been a few attempts, but nothing that could seriously be an alternative as of yet. And it’s maddening, because Microsoft gouges everyone.

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

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

You are going to need 64gb to game comfortably in the future, not very many people build a gaming PC for it to be pretty obsolete 2 years later, and being forced to have to start turning down all your settings. These AAA games get wilder and wilder and more demanding. They are often released in absolutely abysmal states too and it often takes a bit of time to get that cleared up.

Even DDR4 ram is ridiculous right now, 32gb ddr4 plus a tb nvme will probably run you pretty close to a grand. That’s not even a case, motherboard, chip, power supply, a GPU (which may be close to another grand)…

I mean if you want to play Indie games, then sure yeah any old rutabega PC will do it. But if you want it to last 5 or 6 years and be able to play AAA games at respectable levels, then you probably should build it with some muscle.

You want to try and run something like GTA 6 when it comes out on a 1080 with 8gb of ram, I mean you do you.

I don’t pay a subscription on PS5 either. Not everyone online games.

I just happened to be at a computer store the other day, 64gb of ddr5 ram was going to run you about $1200-1600 Canadian dollars. That’s just the ram, and if you are going to be building a PC right now, thats what you are going to want going forward. Even if a PS6 is $1k, it’s still the better buy if this stuff continues, subscriptions and all. Even a lower end gaming PC is going to likely (well)exceed $2k at these prices.

I mean my computer is a few years old now, it was pretty decent spec at the time (5800x3d/128gb Ram DDR4/5070ti). The issue is, when the hottest new game releases on PC, it’s often so poorly optimized that for the next couple of months it chugs, on higher end stuff let alone bottom tier stuff. It’s something that isn’t talked about as much, but PC releases (especially AAA) are more often than not released with poor builds that are fraught with issues that you just don’t seem to get quite as much at the console level.

Not to mention that PC games are all digital now too. It’s all the same issues, problems and behaviours. I don’t like it either, but my point is gaming isn’t perfect in PC land either.

I mean I have both, but you better bring your wallet if you want to PC game. Especially as of late.

Nice try fbi

I don’t think I had a PC game that wasn’t pirated. Literally everyone shared PC games. There used to be programs that would crack the copyright protection codes when they tried to use those little discs in the early 90s.

Console game piracy existed, but it was super rare until the PS1 era. PS1 kind of fell into the same timeframe that cd burners started becoming more common in the household, especially as the millennium approached. Once those mod chips showed up, it was a piracy explosion. PS2 onwards was a little harder to crack, so it wasn’t as popular as PS1 piracy.

When the world started commonly getting online in the late 90s, that’s when the ROMs and the emulation scene started appearing. I think I discovered emulation sometime in 1997. It has been around for a little bit, but was just becoming a bit more widespread at that time.

That or just sure numbers. It kind of feels like when we got satellite as a kid. I spent two days of scrolling the guide before realizing I hadn’t watched a single thing. I was like great, we now have 500 channels of TV, but my life still sucks.

Us3n3t is wild for sure. I mean they’ve wrote the textbook on how staying obscure is the ultimate approach to success with most things. And it just functions. Plus the need for a bit of knowledge acts as almost an intelligence test to keep the morons (and the people who can wreck it) out.

I’m even more lazier than that. Pirate subscription. It’s still a subscription, but I’d argue the 10 dollars a month is worth my time to type an obscure tv show I’ve suddenly remembered into my TV, with one eye open at 2am. I’ve got nothing against a subscription or two, but I certainly am getting sick and tired of like a dozen of them.

All it’s going to take is a recession, and then it’ll be back with a vengeance. Because guess what’s first on the chopping block when money gets tight?

I mean the convenience of it all would say no, but these services have become so enshitified, they pull content constantly, you need to have a billion of different ones, and now they are putting stuff like Atmos and 4k content behind higher pay subs. Plus ads now too, which is infuriating.

So yeah I mean I’m sailing more than I have in the last decade. Because streaming is now just cable except I have to individually subscribe and not just have one subscription (which you just know is around the corner and then it will fully be cable 2.0).

I’m getting mighty sick of spotify too. The great thing about Spotify when it came out was convenience obviously, but moreso was that you didn’t have jammed full iPods or your phone wasn’t plugged up with music. But my phone’s like 256gb now, that holds a shitton of music, it ain’t no 8gb iPod. So barriers removed. And I wasn’t pirating basically at all the past decade either. So they only have themselves all to thank now. Solely. Greedy fucks.