In the beginning there were floppy drives, remember floppy drives? 3.5″ and 5″ floppy drives I’m old enough to remember and we all had them. Early days of memory you had to use them to load your games and save your work. Then briefly zip drives, an attempt to create denser media, they didn’t catch on but my parents were data nerds so we had them. USB drives came next, those live on to today which is a small miracle.
The next stage in optical media were CD-Roms. Ah, my middle childhood. Not as flexible either literally or metaphorically. One scratch and you’re screwed. I must have destroyed thousands. Late childhood they were replaced by DVDs, also burnable, a bit sturdier. Around the time I was getting ready to go to college came Blu Ray. Huge improvement in data density and quality. This is where optical media seems to have stopped.
Because after that came 3D Blu Ray, and also the cursed highest form; UHD BluRay. This would be the one to drive me to the point of madness.
Because you can buy a drive for every one of the forms of media I have discussed, every one, but not a 4k drive, oh no, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. A 4k drive for a computer does not exist in the wild, they are custom crafted like the rings of power in the Lord of the Rings, and often do strange things to their owners.
4k was a mistake, apparently, and woe betide anyone who chose to invest in it, like me dear reader. I bought four of these cursed objects and for five years I’ve been trying to decode them. Today I bought another in my long line of drives that promised to be 4k, and of course they aren’t, because as I said, there is NO SUCH THING!!!!!! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!
You don’t understand, I feel. You can buy a dvd-rom drive for $35. You can buy a Blu ray drive for $60. A 3D Blu Ray will run you $75. However you’ll spend and spend on drives that claim to be 4k at multiple price points, you’ll run tutorials to crack drives, and what you’ll find is that no one makes them. Not for any price may you access them on your computer.
You can watch them on your television for a few hundred dollars of course, but that’s not what I want, I want to load them onto my damn computer and copy them so I can watch them later. As I’ve done with every piece of optical media I’ve EVER OWNED. I’m not giving it to anybody, it’s for me and no one else. The only way anyone else will enjoy it is if they come over, sit on my couch and watch it with me.
I’m still going to be on this…. because it is insane, why make media that is unusable?!
I know a work around of course, get one of those 4k players and attach a capture card, but somehow it feels like cheating. A soul is only a soul if sucked directly off disc kinda thing. Second hand soul dust doesn’t taste right.
It’s just, why not at any price? If they sold them at $1000 a drive, then at least that would make sense, ya know? However it’s not available AT ALL, as in you can’t buy one.
I guess you can buy one pre cracked…. but even then not reliable…..
Just another me vs an unruly giant, unconquerable beast and I keep beating my head against it
anti hero boy (I must succeed), anti hero boy(I must succeed), anti hero boy(I must succeed) Oh anti hero boy (I must succeed)
up in the sky he flies around, when he’s not he’s on the ground and fighting monsters big….. and monster pig
he’s anti hero boy he must succeed (I must succeed)
I think it all goes back to this essential drive I have to harm, to destroy, and I can’t of course, I know, we all know. There have been some I would love to choke the life out of, just squeeze so hard, ya know? I think everyone has been that mad at least once….. Not that I would, though I have tried to do it to myself and come closer to succeeding.
So attacking giants is where I send that energy. Fighting unwinnable fights. Going ever more insane.
Upshot, seriously best thing in a long time is discovering this movie;
Skip to an hour twenty two minute mark if you want to hear my favorite song; it’s a crazy life
However, the whole dang thing is gold, Ed Gein is the prototypical insane criminal. True crime taken to the absolute absurd, whoever made this absolutely does justice to the source material. I have to love how something can be this silly and accurate. Like Muppet Christmas Carol is somehow the most accurate to the text of the original.
I guess that’s the thing about insane criminals, they unavoidably show us what is so absurd about the rest of the world.
Though Ed was actually not the first, there was a German butcher who did similar things during the great depression but didn’t get the press. Enough of my true crime nerdery though.
3 comments
Reminds me of my favorite Slayer song, Dead Skin Mask, lol. Btw, I live less than an hour from where Ed spent his last years, although it’s now a normal prison I think (Dodge Correctional Institution). Another fun fact: I also live about 90 minutes where Stalin’s daughter (Svetlana) spent her last years, at a senior residence in Richland Center, WI.
This sounds like many windmill battles I’ve fought and lost with technology. The short of it is that the controllers of the game don’t like it when we go outside the lines.
With movies, we’re supposed to be a good little audience, watch movies directly from the disc or from a streaming service they control, and be happy with that. The minute we start wanting to (gods forbid) backup our own discs to a hard drive or watch it on something other than the device it’s supposed to be watched on, they create a shitload of hoops for us to jump through, many of which lead straight over a cliff.
I’ve done battle with the whole Region lock bullshit and lost. Like what the fuck. I bought a legal copy of a movie that’s only made in UK. But just because I’m in the US I’m not allowed to watch it? They don’t even make a fucking US Region 1 disc so I’m just supposed to shove my thumb up my ass never to watch the movie, unless I hop a flight to jolly old england and watch it there? ffs
Back to your windmill, yeah I haven’t gone there but I already assume they don’t want us making ‘unapproved’ copies of UHD media (even though we bought it) because it starts setting off their paranoia alarms about piracy. It’s yet another case of society policing itself too aggressively and the result is a loss of our freedom. All because they suspect us.
Well fuck them then, if they want to see me as a criminal and treat me as one, I’ll go ahead and be that criminal they fear. Only I’ll do it smart. VPN and torrent sites. You can find your 4k movies there for free download. I have 2 hard drives full of UHD movies I’ve bought and not bought. Society has turned me into a cancer, but I really don’t give a damn.
yeah, same really, I just set my sights on a replacement pc case and some internal drives because I think some of my troubles might be USB drive related, the USB bus is a harsh mistress. Still, more funds to procure and no idea how.
had another big hit today the pest control company I had hired let me down. If they would hire me…. if ANYONE would hire me, damn job market. I’m not asking for much here, a few thousand bucks so I can work my projects and fix some stuff, so that what little funds I have aren’t all I’ll ever have.
They’re trying to kill the format and I want to fight back any way I can.
I really think I may have been blacklisted from the job market, I mean I am a communist, with my wild ideas that we don’t need billionaires when people are starving and homeless. What the world needs is a few more Luigis. Maybe if the fatcats realize that they can’t hoard all the wealth without consequence they’d get off their fat butts and DO SOMETHING.
There I go, rabble rousing again. They know how to stop it of course, pay me and get me out of this shit hole. I’m a cheap bribe, all things considered, but maybe not, maybe they really can’t afford a couple hundred grand to move my butt out of hooterville. That’s what my mom calls it, though she only refers to where she comes from as that. She thinks this town is the bees knees.