Weekend, We Hardly Knew Ye

The weekend is here, and almost half gone. Today was a whirlwind of going to bed too late (yes, we went to bed late enough to consider it today), waking up too late, and then rushing off to Kinston for a cousin’s wedding. It was a quick thing, but good to see the family. We were back in time to pick up some BBQ and a video at Visart, but when we settled down to actually watch the thing, the player kept skipping it over.


Honestly, I have no idea why these “Digital Versatile Discs” have propagated as much as they have. Everyone was bitten by the “digital” bug back in the late nineties and rushed to adopt anything that bore a “D” in its catchy acronymous name. They never stopped to think about the other faults with analog technologies, such as scratches. You’d think that, in the twenty-first bloody century, we’d know better. But of course we’re still burning incandescent bulbs in our light sockets, we’re still guzzling fossil fuel in our cars, and we’ve yet to adopt scratchless media. All of which means I’ll be returning Possession to the video store tomorrow and switching it out for something else. I’m leaning toward Howl’s Moving Castle.
Maybe we’ll get with the program, barring any further unforeseen interruptions by the MPAA (who has recently admitted to pirating the movie This Film Is Not Yet Rated “because it had implications for [their] employees”… the hypocrisy is palpable!). Even if the video that folks can download onto their iPods is DRMed all to hell, at least it’s being transferred through a fairly reliable medium. Sure, we’ll lose a little bit of that nostalgia involved with unpackaging a physical artifact and inserting it into our music/movie/game player of choice, but when digital delivery services become the norm, then I won’t ever have to get in my car and drive down the street to the video store at 10 o’clock at night.
No, I’ll just have to make a phone call to India because my download isn’t completing. The future, folks. The future, today.


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