Used to be considered simply prudent to back up the vhs tapes you bought and people were encouraged to tape their favorite shows off the tv. Now some random CEO of the month has the right to bury decades worth of creative works?

Recent events with streaming services has really been the best argument for self hosting your own content

Can’t keep archives of Saturday morning cartoons we all grew up with and loved; will sue you for keeping copies of them.

Definitely ok to being three mile island back online for AI though, that’s the ticket to a better humanity!

For real why has everyone with any kind of money gone psycho? Have the bad guys started winning even harder?

The more they delete, the more they can resell every few years as "new" while charging ever more exorbitant prices for!

Yo ho yo ho...

The only way to watch the original Star Wars movies before George completely fucked with them is piracy.

The 4K77, 80 and 83 editions are what you're after. Enjoy. There are apparently reduced noise versions as well, but I thought it was perfect as is. It's old. It's supposed to have noise and grain. The desert scenes in the first one are really noisy and I'm not 100% sure why. Maybe he filmed those on cheaper film stock in smaller cameras, but that's just a guess.

This is why I still download movies and try to keep them. They make up the bulk of the crap I keep on my hard drives.

And there was a time when the computer science world wanted to avoid this... and it was 1990 (yes, almost 35 years ago) when the term digital dark age was coined. It was in response to several things. Firstly: the first voyager probe was sent and the code used to store the information could not be disciphered by (then) the latest computers, which resulted in a problem. The second thing is that governments all around the world were starting to be heavily computerized and the older computers used in the 1960s were 100% incompatible with newer systems.

In the US and UK in 1960 the first census were done by computers, and by just 1976 there were only two computers in the world that could read that data, and one of them was a museum piece.

The FOSS community has done far more to combat this with emulation over the past 30 years than any corporation has ever done. Whether it is for video games like MAME, MESS, or whatever console emulator you want to mention, or by OSes like MS-DOS and Amiga Lemon and countless others that emulate almost every system ever created.

Now these fucks are just shitting all streaming media and forcing normal people to have to break the law by pirating the stuff just to keep the stuff from vanishing into oblivion.

/r/datahoarders

The simple answer to this is to change the tax code to not allow for write offs for completed projects. And to shorten how long copyright lasts (fuck Disney so much for that one)

It's going to be a fun historical period to look back on when there are just huge gaps where IP/product control became so powerful that no record of certain things were allowed to exist.

Enshittification continues

I still have dvds and a dvd player like an old person for just this reason.

I've just realized there's an animated series on Youtube, that I've had a really hard time (read: impossible) finding anywhere else, and if LEGO (yes, I'm talking about Ninjago) decides to delete these videos from their channels, the OG seasons are nowhere to ve found as far as I can tell. Yes, there are some cartoon streaming services but those are few in number and getting fewer, so I wouldn't bet on them or any new ones that spring up having that content available in 5-10 years. And that's worrying. Time to download all 15 seasons and store them somewhere! (oh shit, I don't have enough space, do I)

Edit: found them on a downloads site from the piracy megathread, but only Seasons 1-11. I'll get them all soon enough.

Edit 2: The first 11 seasons from that website come up to just over 105GB and I don't have the space. Do I buy a 256GB USB/ Drive to store this at? I'm scared that I'm getting to the point of becoming a data hoarder. Not too long ago, I didn't know what I'd do with my single 32GB USB, now I have added a 128GB one, and a 64GB Ventoy usb to the mix, and I still don't have enough. Wtf?

They will charge you again for the remake. So nice you have payed twice...

Get the physical medium

Preservation is an invasive and destructive process. Recreating the experience of watching 'The Daily Show' in the 90s or early '00s is already impossible. Language and culture mildew and rot just like leather and wood.

EDIT: People don't seem to understand what I'm talking about. Even the people who are responding in good faith seem confused. That's on me. So I thought I'd try to clarify with an example.

Take the Mona Lisa. Perhaps one of the most preserved objects in history. It's so well preserved that it's impossible to see. Sure, you can look at it, but you won't see it. Taking a picture of the painting is encouraged, but you can't get a look at it in your camera roll either.

If you saw the actual painting hanging on a friend's wall, your first thought would probably not be "what a masterpiece", but "why didn't they remove the default print that came with the frame"? If you go to Paris, you can wait in line to have the "Mona Lisa experience" but the painting you saw wasn't hanging on the wall, what you'll see is the Mona Lisa you brought with you.

(yes, I stole this example from 'were in hell' youtube channel)

Thanks, Obama.