librarypunk - 082 - 2023 Year of Physical Media

Episode Date: February 11, 2023

2023 is the Year of Physical Media! Buy physical porn! TV is an illusion!    This episode is brought to you by Lizard Codeine. Get Gekked (TM).   Readings https://torrentfreak.com/sony-thinks-cloud-gaming-can-eliminate-piracy-and-consoles-210626/ https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1527476420928480    Media mentioned https://www.tumblr.com/catchymemes/705443101126295552?source=share Porn you can’t watch:https://www.tumblr.com/duskydestra/705666837692694528  Missing documentary: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2883206/ Why we all need subtitles now

I have like half of a bloodshot eye. Oh. Because I bust a blood vessel in my eye. Oh, yeah. Which looks really, like, wild, but it's always like, it's fine. It'll just heal in a week. But, like, half of my eye is just red, like the bunnies. I once had a friend who that happened to, and she was, like, trying to figure out what was going on.

Am I dying? She was all, like, worried and stuff, and I was like... It looks really scary. I'm like, can I ask you a very personal question? She was like, yeah, I'm like, have you had sex recently? She's like, yeah, I'm like, that's what happened. With her eye? What were they doing with her eye?

You come so hard that you pressure in your head and you can burst blood vessels in your eye from having really strong orgasms. Holy shit. You have a lot pressure in your head when you come. And she was like, oh, yep, that would explain it. And then like had to go to the doctor and explain to the doctor that she was, was lezoned out too hard that it bust to blood vessel in her eye.

But a bust of vein. Which like props. That's like one of those like ones where it's like you, the guy who like was sucking dick in it like. I'm sure to just throat twice. Ended up in the ER twice. Whatever. Yeah.

Salute the troops. Yeah. It's a really big one. So it's like the whole half of my eye. and it's really gnarly looking. But it's pretty cool. Yeah, it's, it doesn't, you can't feel it. And it just, it just goes away.

But yeah, I had all those rapid cycling mood swings for like four or five days straight. So, I don't know, they'll put me on, on lizard coating. Did we start recording before or after? No, I'm really sad that I didn't get that lizard coding joke in there. My lizard is staring at me right now. speak of the devil oh i know arthur he's just been like like a little lawnmower no i know buddy oh yeah seriously i want whatever drugs arthur's on right now i'm justin i'm a skulkcom library and my pronouns are he and him i'm sadie i work i t at a public

library and my pronouns are they them and i'm jay i'm a music library director and my pronouns are he him i finally got the law and order sound effects so that'll remind us that I have it. Each of us, we should get our own little, like, special little, like, who gets the X-Files one? Who gets the SVU? Each of us had our own little special drop. You get the X-Files one, obviously. It's like, what's your sign?

What's your goofy soundboard drop? Tagers. Bishers. I like anime. Bishes love anime. They just hate you. Biches do love anime. Get that bitch in anime.

I do love the, like, ignorant. slot one about like Bernie Sanders. That one's pretty good. Do you still have that one? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Big nerd slot. Big, big, new slot. I love that one.

So now you delete them for the Joie de Veeve. There's some I don't get rid of because I just think it might come in handy, but some of these have really got to keep them forever. I thought I was going to use ALA Mageddon because like ALA happened and I didn't keep up with anything because Twitter's like broken for me. I can't see anything that's happening. I didn't know about the earthquakes for like till today. I don't know.

There's like a series of earthquakes in Syria and Turkey. And I have no fucking clue. And like, but like any kind of like library stuff, I have no fucking clue what's going on. Because like half of the people have like I followed have left. I do like unfollow people regularly because it's like, oh, I mean, I was going nuts for a few days. So I was like, I don't want to see negative things. There's unfollowed like 50 people or so or like muted them. And now I'll go back and unmute later.

I've just been like playing Sudoku and watching Beyond Belief Factor Fiction for like a couple of days and being busy at work. So I also don't really know what's happening on Twitter for the past couple days. Just Jonathan Frank's going, we got you. Not this time. Not a chance. We made it up. All I know is that it was an ALA conference happening because I know people who were presenting and were like doing like a panel and stuff. Didn't Emily do something?

I think I saw a tweet of Emily doing something. She was on a panel with another person I follow, so I saw them talking about it. Yeah. I was like, is like an ALA happening? I don't know. Is it a big one? Is it like one of the spinoffs? I don't.

I'm going to be going to a conference at the beginning of March. That'll be fun. I don't want to go to conferences anymore. I just want to travel for free and then not go to the conference. Yeah. Isn't that why some places make you like bring the program? and your badge. Oh, that's funny.

No, I've never had that happen, but. I've had to give my badge, but. The one conference I wanted to go to went digital this year, the first time, even though it's been like two years of COVID, but whatever. And I finally felt like confident enough to fly because I've flown a few times this year and haven't gotten sick because I'm always very in 95'd up on a plane, which I think you just should be from now on because planes are fucking disgusting. Yeah, I'm going to go on a choo-choo train to go to the car.

conference. I'm going to. I haven't gotten a cold in like the past three years. So I'm just going to mask up for the rest of my life when I'm in public. Yeah. I got COVID, but I was a bitch who was asymptomatic. So I can't really. So it feels like I didn't get it. I just got like a week off work. It was pissy. Yeah, I do wonder if like what if I got it, but like that's why I've been acting crazy? That was my manifestation of COVID. It's like how like the like the brainworms you get from cats like that make you go crazy like cats 2019 no there's like that parasite or something that that cats that worm that like and it gets in your brain it starts like a tea um i wonder if bunnies can give that to humans like like cats can i think it's like a meat i think it's like a trichinosis

thing right that's from eating meat no it's a um toxoplasmosis oh toxoplasmosis okay yeah yeah i don't know That's what made the Libertarian Bears in New Hampshire go crazy, hype allegedly. They were eating all the trash and they got the toxoplasms or whatever. That's so weird. I was just fucking Libertarian Bears are following me around because I was listening to like old podcast episodes. They do that here. And Kath Barbadoro likes to mention because she's like a New Englander and likes to mention the libertarian bears story as much as you do.

It's great. It's like the best thing that's ever happened. Who doesn't love a good Well, also like a book came out within the past couple of years about it I don't want to read it, yeah It's called The Libertarian Walks Into a Bear I think is what it's called. It should have been exit pursued by a bear.

Right. Arthur, are you like... Because they abandoned the town, right? Yeah. Arthur, do you want A&W Zero Sugar Root Beer? Not sponsored? He's being very... He's really tripping out.

He's just waving at the camera. Yeah, for those not in the note, Arthur had to get his teeps clean today, including getting one pulled out. And they put cats under, obviously for pulling out, but they put cats under to clean their teeth, including incubating them and shit. And so he's coming down off of anesthesia while also having a 24-hour pain med shot because he doesn't like pills. So he's having a good time. He hasn't stopped purring since I brought him home four hours ago. Is it fucking Arthur time, Bob? I know, buddy.

I've got a red-ask Reddit. Oh, by the way, rabbits can get toxoplasmosis, but it's very rare. I'm learning this from Wabbit Wiki. Does it have articles about cross-dressing? It took me a second. Are you swimming on the carpet now? Jay, I'm going to have to cut out too much Arthur time. Okay.

You can cut out Arthur time. That's fine. I'm just too lazy to meet myself. Arthur's happening. Oh, I know about mine. Lost my bucks bunny drop. Okay, whatever. No. So I've got to Reddit ask Reddit.

Those people are dumb-dums. I just got a quick one first. It's like, because I don't understand how Reddit works. So I guess you like, they cross-post from different things. But there's one from Unethical Life Pro Tips, which has gotten overdue library item and don't want to pay a fine. Sneak the book back onto the shelf where it belongs, then later call the library and claim to have returned it. They'll find out on the shelf and check it in without giving you a fine. I've seen that happen by accident.

Yeah, but I'm pro this. Yeah, I've seen like a genuine thing of that happening. Oh, yeah. Where like it didn't get checked in and someone's like, why do I have a fine? It's on the shelf, I don't know. They used to happen all of the time, but it's also really obvious when somebody's like done it on purpose, mostly because it would be like the same person being like, oh, no, I returned that already. And they'd get a claims returned or like claims never had on their account. And the next thing, you know, they've got like 16 books that they never actually checked out.

And you're like, okay, you could, if you could just bring those back, we just, just let us have them back. That's all we ask. Yeah. Finds free is how you get those people to stop doing that. Yeah. I showed that TikTok of that one TikTok librarian who is like at a bar talking about library stuff. The one that read us all for filth. Yeah.

I have not seen this. Yeah, I know. Yeah, I'm trying to like get rid of fines. So I like standing at a bar and they're like, it's like a goth chick. Yeah. It's a goth chick at like an indie music show at like a bar, being like, yeah, we're trying to get rid of finds at my library, you know, it's basically done already, just got to talk to the board. Yeah, I'm not like those other library. I was like, this is every Twitter library and I know. Yeah, I tried to get this band to play at my library, but the board said no. Right, that was it. I tried to get this band to play at my library. Like some Scott Pilgrim level.

like chat at a at a show yeah it's so good so that's pretty funny um there's also i a lot of the the problem i've had with segments recently is because libraries are now in the culture war it's diluted all of like the weird niche stuff so i just am constantly finding it's just like book banning stuff happened i'm like yeah i know we we were really on top of that man i'm really proud of us We were. We beat the zeitgeist by like six months. We sure did. This one's interesting.

It's Colorado Library District has joined Crested Butte News, Crested Butte, Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition, and asking the Colorado Court of Appeals to overturn a judge's ruling that shields the identities of people who want library books banned or reclassified. So a judge basically said that the people who have put in library book I guess, like review forms are like legally shielded, which is strange because I think that's just FOIA. Yeah, you think. And that's why the FOIA people for Colorado are involved.

I'm actually of two minds about this, I think. Yeah, like, ethically, I'm of two minds. Legally, I'm like, pretty sure that's foiable information. Yeah. Yeah, but because it's like, I feel like anytime we have these discussions, and it's like we are always assuming that the person challenging is a, a fucking fascist, which is normally what has been happening. And that the library that this is happening to is inherently good on our side. Oh, it's in a book printed,

therefore it must be true and sacred and we can't ever challenge it. And the library is always good. When in reality, libraries, we all know this, aren't this inherently natural, neutral, good space. And sometimes someone might be challenging something for a very good, reason. And I feel like this could maybe having that information public could like make like maybe like activists or journalists. Arthur, what is it? Like come under attack or something. I don't know. It's one of those shitty things where it's like like I like I know it isn't used this way as much as it is this way. But I know that it's like, but it will still fuck these people over. You know what I mean? And there's probably an elegant way around that that I'm not smart enough to think of. But but also FOIA is a thing. that exists. Yeah, I mean, I can't really see the potential harm because it is just like a challenge form. You don't have to like put your address or anything. I mean, it depends on the form, I guess. But it is kind of like, well, yeah, you could get retaliation from the public. But I mean, like, I think it would probably be best to not even, you know, retain those records after a certain

time. And you could also like on the forums, you can make it so that like identifiable information like names isn't in a required field. Yeah, but then you just get spammed. You'd have to make sure it was like real people. Well, I guess, yeah, it's kind of the same, like, what do they want the information for? Because, like, I can see, like, wanting to check to see if the people who are filing these, like, what are they, like, requests for review or whatever.

Yeah, yeah, something like that. Yeah, I can see people being like, yeah, but do these people even live here? Like, are they even part of the library districts? But like there's other ways you can gather that information. So it's like you can ask people if they have a library card. One of the libraries I used to work with asked if you had read or like watched the material in question and asked you to actually cite specific timestamps or pages from it that you had protests through. So people who were just like blanket spamming libraries with these things or who hadn't even like read it or didn't know anything about it and were just reacting to something from the they learned. on Facebook wouldn't actually follow through with the form because they actually had to do shit.

They actually had to do homework. And never mind, that's not fucking worth it. Right. So I don't know. Like I can see wanting to keep people like people's names and any sort of personally identifying information out of it. But at the same time, like there's absolutely the right for people to know information about who's putting in these sorts of requests. Because like, yeah, if you live three states away, like yours gets on. dramatically thrown out because you're not even a user of our library system. You're not even from

the community. So why should we give a shit about what you have to say about what goes on in our community? And a great thing that you could do so that FOIA is a thing that can happen with these, and also to be able to both screen while also protect is the only thing you require is their library card number. Because the library will then have the information of to whom that is attached, but FOIA can't get that information. They can just see the request to review, but then the library can actually verify those identities and stuff. That could work, yeah. And that's, I mean, yeah, basically, because, like, you could basically exempt library records from FOIA laws. It depends on your state, I guess, because, like, a lot of places don't have laws for,

like, library privacy. So if someone was, like, who is library user number, whatever, you might have to make a legal argument that that's not foiable information. And if you don't have a privacy law, but most places actually do have a public library privacy law. But like archives and stuff like that, definitely that's a wild west of laws. Yeah. Anyway, I thought that was fun. Yeah, that was an interesting one, actually. Yeah, it's an interesting problem.

But yeah, fuck those people. So that was Reddit. So, 2023, year of physical media. Again. Gets yourselves. It was 2020 last year. It's 2023. But I feel like more people are paying attention to your physical media.

We've just been on top of the, like, pulse of our trends. What can we say? Yeah. I just bought a Blu-ray burner. Nice. An external one because I was making physical backups of legally acquired materials. And make your voice deep, like in the crime shows, so that they can't tell who you are.

Oh, wait, actually, I might have that. I sounded good. Deep throat shit. Oh, honey. Legally acquired materials. Please turn that into a drop. Without me shrieking. I don't know how that sounded.

Awesome. Yeah, that's a custom voice I made to sound like those IRA guys. When it's blacked out. Yeah, I, uh, I bought physical porn for the first time. Ever? Yeah. Like a DVD?

Ah, good for you. Yeah. So Vinegar Syndrome, selling a collection of, I believe he's name is Fred Halstead, in the, like, 70s and 80s, I think 70s.

The podcast Girls' guts Jallo, which everyone should go listen to, has been doing a little mini-series called Anal Autors about gay porn directors. And that was the most recent one and Vinegar Syndrome is selling them. So I was like, fuck yeah, I'm going to buy so. So I'm going to own DVD.

No, there's like a limited edition of Blu-rays, I think, like a fucking criteria. So that'll be fun. One of the ones is called LA always plays itself or something, which is like, I know an actual movie documentary too, like the pun or LA plays itself or something. No reference went right past me. Yeah. I'm a snooty asshole. But there's been a lot of stuff in the news for streaming, especially once HBO cut a bunch of its streaming services or streaming selections as a tax write-off.

And then people realized, oh, there was never any DVD release of these, which is interesting. There's an article I was reading about TV studies and digital preservation and things like that. And the digital dark age concept, which was apparently originated in a library conference. So go us back in the 90s. Can I also complain about the term dark ages after, though? Yeah, well, I think they mean it in the same sense that you're going to say, the velocity of sources now? I don't like that meaning either.

But yeah, go on. A lot of those write-offs happened for HBO Plus, and then I think it happened again for, I want to say, Disney does not release DVDs of its original series, so that's probably going to happen with their shows. And then Netflix also does not sell DVDs of their original stuff very often, which we have brought up before. So that's why libraries can never get Netflix documentaries. And in fact, there was that, there was like a white paper that came out recently about library licensing and digital media.

And one of like the recommendations was that there be affordable streaming resources available for libraries. And I was like, they won't do it. but also I don't want it because it would just eat our budget like Canopy does. If there was Netflix for libraries, it would be way more expensive than Canopy. Because Canopy doesn't even have anything that good on it. Well, I watch snooty art movies on there. Well, it has like the less popular documentaries, but like whatever professors always want to sign in their class is like a PBS documentary

or something that we can't get. Yeah. Because they can't get the license. But in the article I was reading, it was very interesting because it said there was like there's been a decline in DVD purchases of TV and movies since 2004, which was also kind of its peak in terms of lots of things were available on DVD. So this is when DVD box sets got cheap, which we've talked about before with like anime, where everything was really, really expensive, and then you could get like a whole season. And then almost immediately there was a

decline in DVD sales probably. They don't really explain why. But I think it was a mixture of piracy and streaming services started being offered. And broadband internet probably allowed for a lot of streaming TV stuff. Like, this is back when you could upload everything on the net, onto YouTube, and they wouldn't take it down for a while. Oh, yeah, I used to watch things in like 10-minute chunks. Yeah. You just had to put the title reverse, and then it was fine.

But the article, which I'll link at the notes, talks about ephemera as being a problem. But there were all these things about the problems of preserving TV that I thought were, I hadn't thought about before. So, like, there's no set TV schedules. So you don't know when things are broadcasts. There are no broadcasters anymore. So there's no, like, centralized distributors. It's all platform focused and subscription. On demand.

Yeah. Remember when you used to have to pay for movies to watch them the instant you wanted to watch them? Paperview. I mean, yeah, Amazon has kind of reinvented that. with the digital rentals, which is really annoying. Because I was trying to watch Mithrigan. And I'm like, I'm not paying $15 to rent Mithrigan at home. I liked Mithrigan.

It was fun. Yeah. Good teen movie. I'm going to legally acquire it. Yeah, Meme Thregan. There's also no preservation of scripts, emails. There's no paper trail. Nothing has to be like, so you can't get those like collectible printed out scripts as much

anymore plus IP control. There's three categories that contribute to a digital dark age, which is obsolete hardware and software, the privatization of data. So academics can't get to data that is describing or that is guiding sort of the business practices. And so there's no way to access that data because that data is sort of highly valuable to the company and expansive IP restriction regimes. So the kind of fear of spoilers, like keeping actors in the dark about the scripts.

I hate that shit. Yeah. I think the whole Mario movie, they didn't know what their lines were in context for, the whole movie. I think all the Marvel movies are that way, too. So they're like act into the dark and they don't understand like the context of like what they're doing. The movie's going to be a trip. Mushroom kingdom, here we come. Someone pointed out that his Mario sounds like Laura Belcher from Bob's Burgers.

Oh, God. The mom from Bob's Burgers. Oh, Linda. Linda, Linda. Look at the tray. It's bats. They love Halloween. It's the favorite.

But someone, like, animated her saying the line. I'm like, wow, yeah, it is. That's her voice. It's pretty good. And it's doing it for the Mario movie, which is not, if the Sonic movie was anything to go from, it's not going to be good. It's going to be like fine, but it'll, it'll be too long and it'll suck. But so, yeah, Jay, what do you want to say about digital Dark Ages? So I know that the way that Dark Ages is being used is user referred to like, oh, because of

XYZ, it's not that things weren't happening. It's just that like it won't be like future generations, won't know about it. Like that knowledge will be lost and not just like, oh, they were dumb as the Dark Ages. But I don't like that definition. either because it uphold this like light dark light versus dark dichotomy um which is pun intended very black and white thinking and also has these weird like renaissance harkening back to antiquity like the neoclassical like it feels kind of fashy to call like something the dark ages just because we don't have records from it anymore i don't know i don't like

the term dark ages because it even though we're using it to mean like oh the sources don't survive and so there's just like this like black hole of information that is lost but it just suggests barbarism like it said like oh and they were barbaric and like that that connotation hasn't been lost um and i just uh it makes me feel icky it's like when people say that something's like a medieval torture device it's like no it's like it puts this whole paints this whole picture of a time period that people were barbaric and stupid and they couldn't preserve their sources or, oh, the church was so evil that it burned the sources or something. Like, I don't know.

I don't like it. Even though Netflix and Disney and all them are evil. It's all their fault when it does happen. But I just don't like using the term dark ages for it. Yeah. It's a useful shorthand, though, in an academic context, because people know what you're trying to say. But that would be funny if there were like return guys for like DVDs.

It's like a guy with Invader Zim and just. says, Ritterverne, the guys who put the marble paintings on their profiles. Oh, yeah. But it's invaders. And look what he was doing at 24. What were you doing at 24? It's like, I was jerking off. That's what I was doing.

He was invading Earth. Not getting any hits on my Invaders Zim content. All right. Well. Sorry. I like didn't watch Cartoon Network that much as a kid. I haven't seen any Invaders Zim in a very long time. I don't remember anything other than the feeling of slight discomfort.

It was just like a hot topic thing. It's like back. Like, Malgoth is kind of like having a renaissance. So like Invader Zim is back. Yep. Like if you go on Netflix right now, like Invader Zims, I don't know if it's just mine because I can't tell. I got rid of Netflix. Yeah.

I like cancel and uncancel every other month. So it depends. I'm like, am I going to be watching a ton of it for the next like three days? Yeah, I'll go ahead and pay for a month, I guess. I'm going to get like 24 straight hours of entertainment out of it. It's worth $15. Yeah, Invader Zim's back. That was my main point.

I don't remember what my time. point was there. Some of the digital dark ages and I was mad about it. Yeah, it's a good shorthand. It's fine. I don't really know what would be an easier term to put in its place. But it is kind of like, it does kind of have an aspect of like, we used to do things better.

But this article that I read was very much like, no, we've always been really bad at preserving TV. It's just that. And everything, quite frankly. Yeah. Yeah. And everything. It's kind of a question of like, are we preserving less?

or are we aware that we're preserving less because there's so much, it's like, it's in our sites. We're like, where does this all go? It's like, why are so many people left-handed now? It's because we're recording that they're left-handed. That and like, you know, like, records management is awful everywhere. Like, this is why all these senators keep having classified documents in their home. Because, like, no one reads the records management policy at your job. I haven't.

I work with the archives all the time. I don't think we have, I mean, my library doesn't have one. I am the library. I'm writing policies right now, but there weren't any when I got there. I don't know about the rest of the institution, but. Yeah, no one reads their institutional policies. I do. If they exist, I think.

Exactly. Yeah, the past. If you're a state school. That's true. So, yeah, I do always wonder if we're just aware that things aren't being preserved, that, like, everyone starts to look at all this email and go, where does this go? especially like where does this go when I leave? Like when I leave this platform, where does this digital double of myself go?

Where does it go when I die? Like how do you pass it on? Inheritance? There's someone I want to get on the podcast who talks about like digital inheritances and your digital double after you die. Like what do you do with it? What do people do with it? So like Twitter having legacy accounts and Facebook having to deal with legacy accounts

and like letting people in to once like someone dies, letting their family members in to control the account and stuff. stuff like that and how platforms really don't want to do that. Like, they hate having to do it. So how do you control that data? And I can already hear someone being like, oh, finally, I can do blockchain to something. But no, it won't work. It'll never work.

It's a technology and search for a solution. Blockchain won't work for anything. It'll work for one very specific, like, logistical thing, and then no one else will use it. And you'll never see it again. It'll be used in, like, the shipping industry. And you'll never have to think about it the way you don't have to think about air traffic control until it breaks. That's kind of the whole digital dark age thing.

The degradation of VHS tapes is also a big problem because VHS tends to degrade faster than DVD, although it's not as bad as I thought. It's like 18 to 20-something years. And they don't make VCRs anymore. Yeah. You got a VCR recently. You had to get a used one. I got a TV VCR like combo. How old is it?

I'd have to check. I think it's like 96 or something. It was my birthday present. It was like my birth miss present from my dad. Hmm. Yeah, because I kind of swore they still make them, but I guess... Last one was 2016, I think. That's weird. Yeah.

Because libraries need to buy them. Yeah. I remember that was a big thing because that was when, like, it's like, oh, we can start digitizing these to make preservation copies now. And, like, circulating the DVDs instead of the VCRs. Yeah. Section 101,8, baby. Yep, you can do it.

It's one of your very good library superpowers under copyright law. But that actually, I don't know if I... I put this in the notes or not, but China will no longer certify certain older tech. Oh, I didn't put it in there. I put it in there. Yeah. You can't cross that today. Oh, that's cool.

Or bad, but. Well, it. So they can't manufacture it anymore, kind of? Pretty much. Yeah. Like, no more. Like, it's fax machines, pagers, landlines applies to anything that's a fixed telephone terminal, cordless telephone terminals and group telephones as well as modems.

Yeah. It's translated, so it's maybe not like 100% great. But yeah, so basically China's, they're not going to be able to manufacture them anymore. The ones that are currently being manufactured can continue to be manufactured, but no more designs will be certified in the future. So it's like you came up with something now that relied on fax machines. You couldn't get it certified. So fax machines that are currently being made can continue to be made until they stop being made by the company. But yeah, so.

Can you like update, upgrade? Like if software, like if like coding, if programming is involved in the technology, is that allowed to be updated? I think so. Like security reasons? Okay. I'm sure. Like the article isn't actually very long. But it just, it sounds like it's the first step in the death now is what it made me think of.

And like, I don't know about academic libraries, but public libraries still get tons of people asking to send faxes. It's still like a super popular service. Same with like a lot of, again, I don't know how this works in China, but I know a lot of like fire alert systems and like security systems actually rely on landlines for certain reasons. Really? Yeah. Previous library worked at the alert system needed two landlines. One as a primary and one as a backup. And then they used the backup line as the fax line for the library to like send and receive.

faxes as well. So, like, there are good reasons to continue to have landlines and faxing. But, yeah, I don't know how that's going to eventually ripple over to the United States. But, yeah, it seems like if you have a pager, hang on to it now, you'll probably be able to sell it on eBay for some money in 20 years. Yeah, the comparison they made was, like, the UK is, I didn't leave it open, but the UK has a, they're changing kind of like their public access laws. So they're like, public services no longer have to keep the fax machine going. So for like accessibility reasons. And they also don't have to, I think it was just fax services,

but they still have to apply affordable phone service, whatever that is in the UK. But yeah, there's a lot of stuff that relies on legacy technology like beepers and hospitals and security systems, yeah, because that's how they can locate you. Because if you call 911 in your phone, it's very hard for them to locate you. every landline has an address attached to it. Yeah. So.

And so do like security systems? Because like every, every apartment and house down here has a like a security system built in. And you have to have a landline to connect it to like the service, like the ADT people or whatever. So not only would you have to pay for like the ADT service, you have to buy a landline to connect it so that they can use it. I wouldn't know anything about it.

I've never used one of these, but I didn't even have them in any apartment I lived in until I moved down here. I have the sticker on my door because this apartment has the technology, but I don't pay for it. And my landlord was just like, yeah, no one ever pays for it here, just but the sticker on the door. Yeah. I haven't had a landline since I was like, I don't know, 18. So. Yeah. No, I don't, I've never had the landline anywhere I've moved.

Yeah. I'm a little younger than Sadie. I miss the cords. Like twirling the cords with your finger. Yeah. It's a tactile. Yeah. There's a lot of, yeah, tactile pleasures that you lose.

Big fan of tactile pleasures. Yeah. Love a good switch. Love good toggle. Love a good button. Just things you can press and turn. Beat boops. Yeah.

I got a student who's got one of those new, like, smartphones that's the screen, but you can still fold it in half. But like the screen. It's fucking gives me anxiety to look at you. holding a smartphone. But I was like, is it satisfying to close it? It does look fun. He was like, yeah, it feels so good.

I'm like, I miss, like, closing a phone. That, like, definitive snap that, like, you know, like early 2019, you know, when you hang up on somebody, kind of. When you slide out the sidekick. Oh, yeah. Did you see that, like, really long Tumblr thread of just wild cell phone designs in the 2000s? No. No. Oh, it's so good.

I'll have to link it in the notes because it's like 30 just wild designs of just like sideways, upside down. Let's try doing ergonomics to a T9 pad, like just absolute weird stuff. I love when they would show up in music videos. Yeah. Well, that was how they advertise them. But you mean now the kids still use them in their music videos? No, no, like old school. Like I know like yeah

They're like oh m g where are you And then it would be like zoom in on it In Excel yeah Or like Like the razor which opened them A Fergie had one And one of her music videos And it was one of the pushout ones

Like this that you do I just realized like half our listeners Are not going to get that Excel joke Because they're all like 20 year old You fucking grad students I'm 30 now I can say that I grew up Yeah, Google it.

I'm not a baby anymore. But I do, I do like, I am curious about those slighty smartphones, but they're like $3,000 or something insane. Yeah, yeah. Maybe once it becomes cheap, I'll play around with the idea of getting one. But honestly, I bought like a Gen 7 iPad where it was like the touch ID for the thumb and the thing was on top. So it's like if you had an iPhone 7, it's the same iPad generation for that.

That's my favorite generation of iPhone stuff. Yeah. I still had a button that I can press. I can put my thumb on it and the battery life is insane. So I can watch Netflix on it for hours and hours and I paid like 60 bucks for it. Nice. So whenever Apple comes up with a good generation of something, buy that because like I had an iPod video 30 gig one, which is a huge amount of storage for the time. I could watch full movies on that bitch.

And I had it for years. I still have like one of the iPod. Dad still has his Zune. I think I tanked the operating system on it, but I had a iPad, like the original iPad video, like with the clicker wheel. Like, I still have it around here. Oh, that's so fun. It wasn't even like the touch one.

It was just the click. Well, it was a touch one, but it also clicked. It was, yeah. It was like very manual haptic feedback. Yeah. Like the old iPads. Yeah. But like the old iPods used to have.

Which confused the hell out of me the first time I, like, it's like, where is it clicking from? Yeah. That was my first, like, because that was my first interaction with haptics. It was like, what's making it click? What's behind this that's making the clicking noise? Oh, it's like an N64 rumble pack. I got it. Okay, cool.

That's how you have to explain haptics to me in, like, high school. Oh, it's like video games. It's like rumble pack. Okay. Yeah, for your phone. Cool. I always hold out so long. on getting new tech, even though I am kind of a techie person.

Yeah, but I also love for new tech. I do kind of like it. But I also am like, I don't like that I can't control the thing. So, like, I don't like that I can't put an ad blocker on my phone that's as effective as the one on my browser. Yeah. And even though I have a pie hole on my network, it can't block, like, video ads because it will block too many videos as well, too many, like, legitimate videos. So the services are two, the domains are too similar. So you can't reliably filter out video ads without just making your DNS reject videos itself. So I am ad guard for Safari and that

blocks YouTube video ads just fine. Yeah. So we're going to talk about porn you can't watch. Yeah. I love this. So there's this really long Tumblr posts. Did I send that to you, Justin? Or did you that to me. I remember seeing it and being like instantly thinking of you too. I sent it to both of you. So there is this, actually I should make this the cover art. Yeah.

There are these home videotape formats from 1970 called Cartavisions. And I guess they were sold with the television. Like, it was a big bundle. And you had to yeah, because you had to build it into the TV. And then it has this

thing of red tapes. So red tapes are tapes that you cannot rewind. So you have to, if you, if it's a red tape, it'll be in like a red cartridge, which meant that it was for the rental industry. And so you would rent it from a place, watch it, and then have to take it back to them so they would use specialist technology, proprietary tech, to rewind the tape for you. Well, when you returned it, because you could only watch it once. And so if you see any of these, they usually have like screw holes in them because someone has had to jailbreak them to. to rewind them since then. Adultery for fun and profit.

Adultery for fun and profit. Grand Prize winner, Amsterdam Adult Film Festival Award 1970 and 1971 for private use. We stand. So, I mean, that's pretty funny that you would, like, use this mechanical technology to send it back to the video store. Like, imagine if Blockbuster did that. They must have done something similar, but...

Well, and I mean... Constructing VHS tapes? I feel like there were. Yeah, because, like... This was an attempt to like, because they were afraid of old school piracy with like the VCRs and like people being able to watch a movie more than once that they own and that taking away from profits. But also like once it was once you could record as well. I think this might have been a little bit before that. But like imagine if we hadn't have had that lawsuit.

Yeah, this was before like the beta Sony lawsuit. Yeah. Like if we hadn't have had. that lawsuit, we might still be in that conundrum. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And I think the tie-in here is that we have like a digital equivalent of these

ephemeral creations. But it was also just too good not to bring up because it's like this huge flat disk that comes in like it almost looks like a floppy disk. Yeah, it looks kind of like it's like

book shaped. It comes in like a fancy book box. It's like if a beta max and a floppy desk had a baby. Yeah. And it was porn. And it was porn. But so I did a little research trying to dig into something that this post mentioned. So in the, so it's really, really hard.

The whole format Cartrevision only lasted 13 months. But people have managed to get video off of one of the tapes and they made a documentary about it because it was someone recorded a copy of Game 5 of the 1973 NBA Finals. game and all of the ABC and both teams had video copies of the game and all three of them lost it, but a fan copy survived in a format no one could play on a tape that would shatter if you tried to play it. So they made a documentary about it and the documentary is fucking gone. It's not on, it's not anywhere. Of course it is.

Of course. So I went looking for this documentary and literally the publisher that made it. It has like promo pages for it. So the documentary, if anyone else wants to try and find it, report back. Yeah, it is called Lost and Found, the 73 Nix championship tape. And it says it won an Emmy, but people have looked into that and said that it might not have. So it's this documentary about a dead format that no one can verify if this documentary actually exists.

So I started to wonder if it was like an urban legend about this documentary that someone like, is made up for a town of leaves. Yeah. Yeah. House of Leaves is also about a fake documentary. Yeah, but I could not find it. And people are like, oh, search the Internet Archive, but it's not there either. So I don't know.

If your library bought a DVD copy of it, good for you, because you probably have, like, the only access to it that anyone has. But maybe they never sold it on DVD. This is a thing I have with theater, actually. Whenever live theater is, like, created, like, recorded, they always make it the biggest pain in the ass to get the recording. So, like, if you want to stream it, like, I had to, like, pay in pounds to, like, this company that had, like, its own proprietary video streaming software just so I could watch, like, the much ado about nothing with David Tennant and Catherine

Tate. And it took forever to set up an account with them. I have had theater professors trying to get, like, war horse and stuff like that, which we know was, like, we know it was recorded. but the DVD is either a hundred-something dollars, which is like, easy, we can do that. But then the rest of it is like that's only on streaming and there's no DVDs. And it's like, we can't get access in the United States to these things because they're all produced in the UK. Weirdly, a lot of opera recordings are way more accessible than you think they would be. like opera is like light years ahead of Broadway and even standard theater when it comes to recording performances and making them available in pretty accessible like physical if not also free digital formats which is weird considering it's opera yeah i wonder if it's like a u.k industry thing like because all these theater productions are all like in the UK. Glindborn is also in the UK

And they have all their shit on DVD And you can buy it Yeah, a lot of it I don't understand why you would record it And then make it really, really hard To get the recording But I just, I guess I just don't understand theater Video game streaming, we've talked about it before

But Stadia did finally die So Google Stadia was streaming To like video games to Your computer over broadband And the weird thing is Nintendo still does this, but Nintendo's doesn't work. I was a beta tester for Stadia, and it worked from the beginning perfectly. And Nintendo did this with, like, certain games that are like the switch can't quite run.

So they're like, okay, we're going to stream it. And it's dog shit. Because, like, you can't plug your switch into an Ethernet cable, so it has to go over Wi-Fi. I have good Wi-Fi. I keep my own router. I have a really good router. I have broadband connection. I could sit right next to the router next to my fiber optic.

internet and it would still be like its connections to unstable. Can that be something I bitch about? The fact that half of the laptops produced nowadays don't have an Ethernet port on them anymore because it's too big. Yeah, I hate that. Yeah. Also, I heard recently something I've been thinking about a lot

is someone I think someone retweeted as like a library person was like, why can't you hear the sound in movies anymore? It's because the audio has been mixed down so many times because the movies are made for like 8K audio surround and that has to be mixed down and mixed down and mixed down.

And then when it finally gets to you and it goes on your stupid flat screen TV, your stupid flat screen TV has speakers that point to the wall and the speakers are too fucking small. So you can't hear the sound through your TV speakers because your TV speakers suck. They objectively suck. And it's too dark because you don't know how to set your TV settings. I mean, that's not my fault, not knowing how to set.

the TV settings. Yeah, no, they're obtuse. I'm not reading the handbook for the recently deceased to figure out how to turn off auto, theater mode, ADR, scroll. I was just talking about Beetlejuice literally like today. It's a good movie, and you can get it on DVD, which you should do. Which you should. Or put it on a DVD legally.

Legally acquired. But I haven't ever. even finish my thought when I was saying that whole why I had to buy a Blu-ray player because all these legally acquired files are bigger than DVDs because

a DVD is 4.7 gigs and all these legally acquired things to burn a viewable copy on a big screen. You need more space than that to put it to properly burn it. So I don't have a Blu-ray player for my TV, but I do have one

for burning and just like for backup because it's a good preservation medium. It really is. It's easy to repair. We've talked about this before. Yeah. At home stuff, DVDs and Blu-rays are good. I bought an M-Disc writer and it does not like my computer. It does not work. No. I know you were excited about that. Yeah. Because it was supposed to play DVDs, Blurays, and M-Disks and be able to write to all of them. And I was especially going to put like, you know, all of my grad school stuff and personal files and stuff.

I was going to put that all on an M-Disc and put it in like, you know, with my birth certificate and whatever. Because I basically have like my archival setup for when I die. So I've got like two file boxes. And it's got like correspondence from my grandmother. It's like already labeled like an archival manuscript collection because I worked in special collections. So I've got special collections for myself.

Well, it's also used it from Texas. Yeah. I should put it in like a little coffin box instead. It's really like responsible. off of you. Yeah. Yeah. The Justin Files.

Yeah. So I have them in a little, like, it's not a Hollinger box. It's like a fabric one, but it's the same size. And I have acid free folders. And I have my correspondence in there. And it's all labeled in pencils. So you can relabel the, you can erase the pencil and relabel it if you have to when someone has to process it after I die.

So it's all, it's all there. Fucking nerd. Ready to be done. nominated to a university upon death. To the John D. Fuxmith Institute. Yeah. Mine won't be like 100 boxes that you have to weed. I've already pre-weeded it.

I'm like, no, this doesn't go in the file. But I wanted to put an M-Disc in there of like all my grad school notes and everything before I like lose them because I keep copies moving over in case one day I want to go back to like all these essays and stuff I wrote in grad school for my history degree because there's just so much stuff that I wrote and took notes on that would be interesting to go back to in some point in my life that I'm not going to print out. So I would really want to put that on an M-Disc, but I'll do it eventually. But yeah, that was why it was my responsible goth lifestyle.

I was just going to put Memento Mori on the archival box. This is not a place of honor. But yeah, video game streaming, Stadia died just because no one fucking cared about it. And even though people aren't really buying physical copies of games as much anymore, They're mostly buying digital copies, which is a problem. And I'm guilty of this too because I buy a bunch of stuff on Steam. But that's kind of why I'm wedded to PC gaming because, like, in my head, I can back up all this stuff easily because it's all on my desktop. I can download it.

I can back it up. Even though the files are like so fucking huge. I don't know if that's true. But in my head, I'm like, this is more secure than buying a PS5 with the digital only stuff. Because there's a lot of things. I have like an old 3DS and I bought a lot of digital gaming. on there. And so if that account goes down, I could never

recover those games. And if they're no longer downloaded on that particular 3DS, then I could no longer get them back. So yeah, I worry about that with digital only games. So buy cards while you can. Switch still sells them. It's just, you know, you got to go to the game store

if you still have one. Those are kind of going away. Is game stop good or bad? Do we want to say support your local game stop? Do we like them? I don't know. I'm not hit any discourse. Are they bad? They're fine. Arthur, what do you think? It's not as good a business as it used to be. Like, you used to be able to, like, get more used stuff.

And then they kind of just stopped being, like, a video game store. Like, the archetypal video game store, like, the one we went to in Portland. Yeah. Or, like, everything is just, like, old. And it's just there. GameStop's used to be more like that. And now that's, like, only releases. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I remember, like, that was the whole point of fucking going to GameStop was to, like, trade in your old games or, like, buy used games or, You could even rent things from GameStop, couldn't you? Yeah. I think so.

I was like the only fucking point of going to GameStop was to get used shit and sell your old shit. There was like a Netflix subscription for physical games. Like, so when Netflix used to send you DVDs, you used to be able to get like Xbox games too. Oh, nice. And that actually was pretty cool. Yeah, that is really cool.

So I'm sure there's stuff like that. I'm really fascinated with like video game preservation TikTok stuff. Like, well, it's mostly like it's not preservationists. It's mostly people who sell used games and, like, repair them. And so it's usually like mail order businesses. They're not really like chain stores. So, you know, support. If you want to get physical games, you're probably going to have to order them if you're worried about your digital versions going away.

But, Jay, you wanted to talk about sheet music. Yeah. So, like, I feel like when we had these discussions about, like, physical media, obviously, like, right, normally we're talking about audiovisual materials lately, right? And if we do have the discussions about print materials, it's normally like e-book versus other book versus like audiobook, which we're going to have an episode about that coming up. Dear listeners, don't you worry, your pretty little heads. But I, in my position now as like a music librarian, there's a lot of stuff about like physical media of like sheet music where even libraries that have the money and the technology to digitize stuff or to. to circulate, like, digital sheet music materials are often very hesitant to do so because, like, so there's this, and I hope Mike Newman isn't listening to this and then listens to me

shit talking is app, which I kind of like, because we're tight, like, you know, as far as vendors go, the encoder. And it's like a subscription, like sheet music, like you would, any other sort of, like, subscription. You can, like, take notes on sheet music and, like, there's various layers and you can share it with other users and it's not just academic. Individual people can get subscriptions to it and like you can perform from it. Some of the stuff in there even has like the rights built into it. And they're always uploading shit from publishers. I swear this is not like a pitch.

But it's like it's really cool. But like you have to have a tablet to use it. You can't print things off from it. You can't make PDFs from the sheet music in there. If I even try to do instruction with it over teams or Zoom, It does that annoying bullshit where it blacks out the screen because it can tell your screen sharing. It tracks where your mouse is on the screen and keeps that information for about seven years, among other things.

And it's like, I have professors because we have this and we're trying to encourage people to use it because we're trying to move digital, quote, paperless because we don't have the space. We just don't have the space for a lot of stuff. So it's like the more digital we can go, you know, then we can prioritize what we do by physically. At least that's my thinking about it. But it's like, you know, we have music ed people who like in the summer do like workshops with kids. Are all the kids supposed to have iPads? Are there enough outlets in the concert hall that you can charge the iPads in? Are we going to require all students admitted to this school to have iPads? You know, all this sort of stuff. And not to

mention, okay, you are an ensemble and maybe you are doing a piece off of one of the various subscription or digital sheet music services out there. And a week before, or maybe the night before the performance or something, they take it off the app. And so what the fuck do you do in those situations? And it's like, that's obviously an issue, unless you're playing like fucking Bach or something. You can go on IMSLP, which for those of you not in the know, is like an international sheet music where people can upload digital scans of, you know, out of copyright or public

domain sheet music. And that's what most students use. They go find it on IMSLP. print it out. And that's what they do as PDFs. It's all there. And so you can always find Bach on there. But a lot of like contemporary and modern, especially smaller composers, you know, women

composers, queer composers, like black composers, like all of these like great people whose works we should be performing and collecting in our libraries and whatnot are often only selling their scores as PDFs. They have their like self-public. publishing almost. Or it's like through rights with some like, you know, some small publishing place, but you buy the physical, like you buy the PDF. And so a lot of libraries are like, okay, what do we do with this? Can I collect this? Can I make a copy of this? How much printer paper do we have to use the print this out for everyone? How many copies of that are we allowed to make? Like all of these logistics of like all of the cool new stuff that will be lost. We're never going to fucking. and lose Bach. Like, I could go burn every single box score in my library right now, and it would be fine. Like, it might be annoying, but it'd be fine.

But, you know, I, there's a composer, like this black artist group that my conservatory is working with right now. And the library bought some of their pieces as PDFs. And with permission from them, I had to, like, actually send those off to, like, a printing shop in have it to get them bound so that we could actually put them. in my library because he literally just sent me like a Google drive link and it was like here here's the PDFs well and so it's like yeah and like that's not uncommon like often I'll get professors like asking me to buy things and they're just available as PDFs like this isn't even on like sheet music

plus or something it's like buying from the composers directly and that might be the only way you can get it and so this is like a huge issue in and music librarianship right now because it like limits the diversity of your repertoire. It limits who has the ability and the excessive, like, who can access and, like, actually perform these pieces and how. And, like, no matter how hard we try to be like, oh, let's diversify the canon, let's get rid of the canon, let's do all this stuff. If it's only digital or, like, we haven't made it accessible to move all digital, that's never going to fucking happen, right? Like, what? What use is it digital only if people can't perform from it?

So it's like a huge fucking thing right now. It's like the major pain in my ass right now is just this like, oh, I want it like, we can't do that yet. I don't, I can't do control digital ending guys. I don't have that technology at my library yet, right? And so it's like also with like IP laws and copyright because with music, it's a fucking mess because you, you know, how do the grand rights for performing operas or musicals play into this when you have to rent

music like scores instead of buying them and to have like the license to perform them and stuff? Like when you have all these like really restrictive IP and copyright and royalties, like all of these various laws, it makes it harder to actually then go and actually maybe explore with like, hey, let's see if we can move digitally for this. because if I had less copyright restrictions, that wouldn't be a fucking problem. Or if things weren't so expensive, like tablets and stuff, it wouldn't be a problem. Like, there are so many things where this wouldn't be a act, like, the digital thing is not even necessarily the problem sometimes. It's the everything around it that fucks with that.

That is the problem, even though we do like our physical media. It's just that like it being digital is not necessarily the core problem, I think. Digital just adds another complication. On top of a fucking weird ass cake. Yeah, it's like we've gotten the ability to do digital and like the desire in all aspects of physical media. We can all do digital stuff now. But then every like we can do it, but then to actually support it and make it feasible is not there yet. So it's like we've got this thing where we've got the tech to a certain place.

But the ability to actually access that tech. It's like they did it and they're like, okay, now what? I feel like is where we're at in most things, if that made it look a sense. Yeah, it's probably like a similar problem to whenever a report comes out or something comes out that's like your two options are ebook, PDF, like a PDF, like a PDF or a physical one. And people want to get an ebook version of it, but you can't get it through like ProQuest. So it can't get into the library lending system. Yes, unless you could do control digital lending. Right.

Which most people can't. And like, I think X-Liepers has some stuff that they're rolling out, but it's still, it's still, like, not ready. And also that court case with the Internet Archive, it might not go their way. Is it still, what stage is that at? It's still pending, I think. I just, I literally just saw a piece about it that was against it from, like, a pro copyright, like, conservative group. But, yeah, but I can't say his legal argument was that bad because, like, all the critiques, I said, where it's like the thing they did was not controlled digital lending.

And that's, but then he, he was like, well, the whole premise internet archive is using for controlled digital lending. They undermined it by then turning off the limits of their own legal theory. So they could undermine their case and lose, which has always been my position that internet archive did a stupid thing and could potentially ruin internet control digital ending for the rest of us, even though we had Kyle on. And he said that it couldn't do that. I still am not entirely sure.

Arthur, what do you think? Arthur's like seeing six dimensions, so maybe he knows. Too bad I have had phones in, and Arthur can't hear that. Yeah, he'd love it. I think that's everything. And we started late, so we're going late. So, yeah. Go buy some physical porn.

I promise it's fun. Mine hasn't got here yet. Yeah, also the thing I've been saying, buy porn that doesn't need electricity, because you get real bored when the power goes out for like three days. So, buy a magazine, buy a smutty comic book. Yeah. By a flip book. Buy an erotic flip book.

I have an erotic, I have an erotic tarot deck now. Incredible. Yeah. The hanged man is like a sexy St. Sebastian. People love making that man sexy. I think like number two behind Jesus of making a dying dude sexy is St. Sebastian. Right. Because like with Jesus, you can just put pussy.

all over. Yeah, or like make his abs into like a dick and balls. Yeah. I love that the movie Benedetta actually went there and gave us Jesus with a pussy. Makes sense. Thank you, Paul Verhoeven. Good night.