GrindingGears

Some of us still had geocities pages in this era!!

I can't figure out how to get my cell phone to do what I want half the time anymore, but I bet you I could still efficiently knock you off a page of pretty fancy html code, all set to upload onto your domain space that's literally three miles long.

It was definitely a wildly practiced sport for sure. If you had kids like we all were, those tapes got used. But for the adults, yeah it was basically just for sport.

My dad had us on the VCR train pretty early on, so we had a model that was from 83 or 84, like whenever they basically first came out for home use. All those scrambl and antipiracy protections they had later on, it wouldn't pick them up. So if I remember this correctly, as long as you used the older VCR to play the movie, you could copy it on the newer one, and those protections wouldn't work and it would come out just fine. I even remember, quite vividly, when we discovered that. One of those key moments in our household.

The ol de-srambler. Those were def pretty rare (in my area anyways) I think I only ever actually saw one of them in the wild. We live pretty close to the US border where I'm from, so everyone in my area missed the descrambler phase, but were pretty captivated in that whole DirecTV copy the card and unlock all the channels for free era. My buddy even had the card copier thing and everything, like you'd get whacked and he'd just nonchalantly would stroll back across the street and burn you a new card, and you'd be back up in like 5 or 6 minutes.

The ol era where you figured out like gee I've got 600 channels here, but I still cant find anything on that I want to watch lol.

It's like VCRs now though, in that I don't think I have an actual player or a disk drive in any of my computers anymore. I think some of them would work in my PlayStation, but I also have Spotify and IPTV, so in the time it took me to write this comment, I'd have it called up.

For the record though, I know for a fact they still largely work. I did verify that a few years ago, when my wife tried to throw them out.

We were friends with a family that had a satellite dish (think like a huge ass monstrosity that was almost as big as the house out in the backyard, not those direct TV small ones on the side of a house that came much later). They had the US movie channels, so they would plow I think it was generally about 3 movies on a tape, and then you'd just take that tape home and we had a couple vcrs at this point, and you'd just rca cable them together, one played and one recorded. And you were the king of the neighbourhood, because you often had movies well before the rental store had them, they'd often still be in theatres.

Your points are on the money for sure. I also found that Blockbuster adapted to my ability to copy a DVD pretty quickly. The whole process back then, if you only had one drive like I did, and you were copying it for a dvd player that didn't have any of the .Avi codecs (which as someone else pointed out wasn't very common, and it wasn't), it took foreverrrrrrr. Like it was pretty much an hour ish long process, sometimes even a bit more in the early days, whereas if you rented a movie from blockbuster they came out with that whole "you can just keep me for an additional $4.99" or whatever it was for that movie, but it very often wasn't all that much. So it's like sure I've now spent 8 or 9 bucks on this movie I want to keep. But if I burn it, the stack of blank dvds was still 20-30 bucks back in those days, which usually broke down to about like 50 cents or whatever each, so still cheaper. But then you factored in the hour and a half of pissing around, and half the time one of the blank discs would be bad, or you'd screw a setting up or whatever, like it would take multiple discs to do it sometimes, and it just often wasn't worth it.

That is until the dvd players that could read the .avi codecs caught up, and then .mp4 files and whatever else. Then you could usually slam a few movies on a disc if you didn't need fancy sound. That was the period of time it became much easier to just d/l and burn. Broadband Internet was in a lot more areas by that time, like you generally had faster speeds to d/l and the burners were burning by then at like 24x or even sometimes ~48x if I remember right. And you could have almost weeks worth of movies on a single dvd, if you were a one movie every few days kinda guy like i was.

If it's thorns that are doing it, have you tried tubeless? That sealant stuff will seal a pretty sizeable thorn hole pretty much almost instantly. I've had rides where you look at it after, and you can see all these little pinholes of sealant poking through, but you haven't had a noticeable loss of air. I've only ever had one flat on tubeless so far, in the decade or so that I've been running it, and it was because I was being arrogant and running my tires at basically 10psi. Got it caught between two sharp rocks that basically did a snakebite on the sidewall. Still got it plugged and blown back up on the trail in under 5 minutes (which is my opinion the best part of tubeless). The cons are your tires go flat if it sits for a period of time, and you have to top them up fairly regularly, but it's worth it IMO.

He'd like em a lot better, if he took the tread off and stuffed them inside a tire. Still wonder to this day how mountain biking hasn't picked up on Mousses. They came pretty close with those cush cores, but they still weren't really meant to be run flat. I run mousses in my dirtbike, and they generally kick ass. A big miserable to install the first couple times until you get the hang of it, but awesome.

I generally like traction.

German beer kicks major ass.

I'm pretty sure they are also in for a rude awakening. The NHL literally just doesn't give a shit about the product or the long term results of these contracts, and instead just wants to chase short term payouts for the ownership groups. It'll be so front loaded it's not even funny, and probably involves a sizeable initial payment right up front to ownership. Their "grow the game" spiel is getting pretty tiring and is just lip service, grow their wallets would be a more apt description. They pretty clearly don't give a shit about their fanbases. Most of whom will continue to follow them like mindless robots, cheering for teams that haven't won since Reagan (or even Nixon) and have zero accountability for it.

The major league product is so over monetized that its comical to watch live, they play like two plays then everyone stands around for five minutes talking to each other while the TV commercials play. Can't go to a game affordably anymore anyways. $ea$ons becoming $o damn long it's turning into baseball, where the first half of the $ea$on arguably doesn't even matter. You need to fork out hundreds a year to follow along, half the games blacked out, and then listen to them piss and moan about piracy. It's nuts. Can't listen to it on the radio here because their Robellus Monopoly just shit canned any free method of watching or listening.

Fuck em.