At least I’m not the only one who’s screwed up a taping of the adult version of Twice Upon A Time - the version with all the swearing
See, as I’m sure Fenris knows, this movie was played over and over on HBO back in the '80’s. And for some reason I was smart enough to know that this was a rare movie that I loved and therefore would never be seen again.
So I would tape it.
I set up the tape and sat back, ready to hit the record button when the movie started.
The movie started …
… and about two minutes later my brain stopped being distracted by the pretty colors and I realized that I had forgotten to press record!!!
I leaped at the record button and hit it.
And this was the last time HBO played the adult version.
So now I have a copy of the movie - labeled and I know where it is and everything - with the first two minutes missing. The movie starts in the middle of the cast-of-characters bit at the beginning.
Fenris-
This could be a great after-school job for some kid! Place an ad in the local high school paper: Identify and label my VHS tapes, 50¢ each.
You could let any nieces, nephews or younger cousins know that labeling your tapes would be a perfect birthday gift. Doesn’t cost them anything and it saves you a big headache.
Better yet, let their parents know that your anonymous tapes can be used as carrot or stick as they see fit. “If you don’t stop that right now, I’m sending you over to Uncle Fennys’ house to label 25 of his tapes!”
Think of the service you’d be doing the young ones. You can bet in future that all their DVDs will be labeled properly.
Fenris, I feel your pain, but my problem is with cassette tapes.
I have a box with about 150 unlabeled (is that a word?) cassette tapes. I know somewhere on those tapes, I have live concerts, special radio performances, and even crazy news stuff meticulously taped. Do I know what’s on any of them? Nope. And it will probably be a cold day in hell before I sit in front of a stereo for an entire weekend and write out cassette jackets for all those tapes.
[Gaspode jumps into time machine - goes back to meet self in 1987]
“You stupid fuck. DO NOT overcharge your credit cards. You’ll keep paying off your bills to your dying days.”
“Fuck off, grand dad. I’m gonna paaaaaaarty.”
“It’s better if you stay home. You might wanna label your video tapes. And try to find the time to put all the photos, that are now in a plastic bag, into an album.”
“Sheesh. You’re boring. Go away.”
[Gaspode comes home to his own time, stumbles on plastic bag filled with un-labeled video tapes and photos. Sighs as he looks on the stack of monthly bills.]
I think all VCR manufacturers should be required by law to build labelmakers into their VCRs, which could then decide by either the VCR+ number, or the time/date/channel of the recording what the program is.
–neutron star (who wants the government to protect him from himself only when its convenient for him )
See, this is the problem. You all think going back to your past selves and explaining it to them is gonna change things.
You have to get Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come on your own assses. Drag 'em back up this end of the woods, show them, in graphic, living color the utter horror your follies have leashed upon you, and then send 'em back, laughing maniacally.
I also have some issues with my past self (and it is not even my distant past self). It goes like this:
Past Self 1998-1999 buys computer with DVD player. Buys several DVDs.
Past Self decides DVD cases are very bulky and buys a “wallet CD keeper” that holds 24 DVDs. He owns about 8 DVDs, so it works out.
Medium Past Self begins accumulating more and more DVDs, almost compulsively, and CONTINUES THE TREND of chucking the cases. Medium Past Self runs out of room in DVD wallet and buys another one.
Recent Past Self has over 80 DVDs, so decides to buy a CD Tower. Of course, said tower requires DVDs to be in a, get this, jewel case, so Recent Past Self begins painstakingly labelling individual jewel cases, whilst accumulating more DVDs, which are now kept in the case, so he has nothing to fill out the empty spaces in the Tower.
Present Self smaks himself for changing “storage” systems every week and decides to foregoe any further attempts to make sense of it all. Tower is full of unlabelled clear jewel cases which have to be taken out one by one in order to find a specific movie.:smack:
My present self doesn’t understand my grandfather’s obsession with taping everything on TV. Ms. America Padgets, “It’s a Wonderful Life” (yeah, that won’t be on TV enough every Christmas). Discovery Wings episodes. John Wayne movies. The man’s been taping stuff since the early 1980s. He never watches any of it. Oh, he’s clearly labeled all the tapes and for 20 years he’s been talking about how he’s going to index them and cross-reference them and whatnot. He never has. I think he’s harboring a secret fantasy that one day NBC or CBS or ABC will call him up in a panic and scream “George! We need your copy of the 1992 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade! Our file footage is lost!” Even my grandmother, who has never touched a computer or a DVD/DVD Player in her life has told him that VHS is a dying medium. He refuses to listen and he keeps taping stuff he has no intention of watching. I haven’t counted but I think it’s safe to say he has over 1,000 video tapes of stuff nobody that nobody has ever watched.
My present self knows I will inherit these tapes some day. My present self knows my future self has no desire for these tapes. My future self will forward them to Fenris for proper archiving to a digital format.
If Fenris could go back in time and label his tapes, then this thread he wrote about it would never get written, so his plan for going back in time would never get formulated, so the tapes would never get labelled, so the thread would get written…to hell with grandfathers, I think he’s reformulated the Classic Time Travel Paradox.
I’ll tell ya why. I taped the original HBO Tenacious D episodes years ago, when no one had ever heard of the D (or even Jack Black for that matter). Once they broke out, I had something to show people: “Hey looky here, I was there first!” My ego was briefly stroked, and my desperate insecurity was momentarily assuaged. What other reason could there be?
Easily 3/4s of the “Can you identify this movie” threads in CS that I respond to, I never need to go peek at the IMDB to answer. I just look up at the shelf across the room from me, and fairly frequently, get lucky and see the very flick in question.
As I said, though, in my case, given my taste in movies, it’s usually not just, “I was there first,” but, “I was there first, and it was so awful that I nearly busted a gut laughing. You’ve got to see this shit to believe it.”
[sub]Robot Jox, and the entire first season of Liquid Television, come to mind as I reread that last sentence.[/sub]
Robot Jox? How could anyone avoid taping that? That movie was like the Melissa virus a few years ago.
I used to be a tape packrat too, along with a friend in college. What we did was swap un-ID’ed tapes: the mystery of each other’s tapes compelled us to fast-forward through every second to see what was waiting for us. “Hmm…Deep Space Nine…Saved By The Bell…police chases…the last 15 minutes of Orca…”
Videotapes are so hard to throw away. They’re highly reusable, plus they have that thick heft to them which makes it like throwing away a hardcover book. TiVo’s great, but I’d kill for a machine that I could pop a tape into and get it completely catalogued with thumbnails.
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