#Data Tapes

[opendirectories]

[dinosaurspen]

Control Data Corporation 607 tape drive

[robsheridan]

recombinance (2004). Early works with DV data corruption, 20 years ago. As I mentioned in a recent post about NIN’s 2002 And All That Could Have Been DVD, I became during the creation of that film fascinated with the aesthetics of Y2K-era consumer digital video. I was drawn to the uniquely chunky corruption blocks that occurred on lightly-damaged DV tapes, how they were sparse and sometimes gentle in nature.

I filmed some soft gradients, some out-of-focus landscapes and other smooth organic surfaces, and then damaged the tapes (wrinkling the tape, applying magnets/heat, just enough to disrupt the data but still let the tape pass through), seeking the right balance where the harsh digital corruption disrupted and contradicted the soft backdrop while also at times trying to become part of it.

It’s how things felt in the post-millennium migration to all-things-digital, like our old organic analog world was fading out of focus as more of it became rapidly mass-digitized, encoded, and compressed down into tiny efficient grids that more or less replicated what we were at the expense of all the complicated gradients of humanity in between.

Harsh DV data glitches and video interlacing against soft organic textures would form much of the inspiration and methodology of my NIN With Teeth album art in the latter part of 2004 and early 2005.

You can read more about my digital glitch art processes for With Teeth, and download a full tutorial, on my Patreon.

[phantom-of-the-apartment]

[atomic-chronoscaph]

Ol' Yellow Eyes is Back - Brent Spiner (1991)

[fuzzyghost]

[booasaur]

The Morning Show - 3x02

Here at UBA, we pride ourselves on being transparent with all of our viewers. We consider you part of our family. Which is why I need to let you know that certain things may come to light, personal things that were never meant to be shared. While all of our lives are increasingly public, each of us has the right to our privacy. And this network will continue fighting for that right, no matter the cost. UBA as made a decision not to pay the ransom demanded by the individuals who have stolen the private data of thousands of dedicated employees.

[stone-cold-groove]

If only William from HR would visit more often...

[opendirectories]

[castielsupernatural]

breaking my hiatus to let y’all know that the republican party’s new campaign tactic for november 2024 is to criticize joe biden for not releasing the tapes literally hell yeah brother ive been wondering his plan about that too

[spockvarietyhour]

Just how I like to sleep

[commodorez]

Data General paper tape reader

[mirandaindustries]

[kn-1013]

i know i've been on my anti-modern AU propaganda lately and it's just because i've been delving deeper into the sally face ao3 tags and i just keep finding them over and over. it's frustrating because there are a lot of really interesting concepts out there that would fit really well and make for a genuinely really interesting story in the 90s, but they get thrown off because the author doesn't know enough about the 90s to write for that time period, so they make it into a modern au instead. there's nothing inherently wrong with that, and i think there's room for modern aus to be done well here, i even have my own half-serious modern au, but i do think you often lose part of what makes sally face special when you turn the story into any other kind of contemporary love story/horror story/etc where all the characters just have ~iphones~ and use ~snapchat~ and all these things.

like, the 90s was not some kind of alien planet, and a vast number of the problems that you're solving with smartphones can be worked around very easily with just a bit of research or thought. long distance walkie-talkies, pagers, and PDAs were all (though sometimes expensive) perfectly capable contemporary technologies for talking to people when you are not physically with them. in fact, a lot of the abbreviations and slang we use over text right now was developed by young people in the 90s using pagers to talk to their friends. PDAs were a bit more out there in the 90s than they were in the aughts, but it's still completely plausible for henry in particular to have one, considering he already owns a home computer, which was not at all ubiquitous in the 90s. considering the apparent financial limitations that he and sal live under (it's never stated explicitly, but i mean, they live at addison's, they can't be in a great financial situation) and how insanely expensive computers were back then, it's more than likely that henry's job requires a home computer of some sort, meaning that a PDA would probably be incredibly useful to him if he were away from it, because there's no way in hell he's getting himself a luggable or another kind of early laptop to bring with him, that would've been too expensive.

and that's ignoring the fact that so many situations where two characters are apart form each other but need to communicate could just be fixed by rewriting the plot so that they can meet in person. i know that's not what people wanna hear because rewriting sucks, but you can find a lot of reasons for characters to meet each other randomly or to have reasons to meet up later if you give it a bit of problem-solving. part of what makes the pre-smartphone era interesting to write for and so optimized for horror, and probably a big reason that gabry chose this time period for the story in the first place, is the level of disconnection between each character in the story BECAUSE they don't have things like smartphones. having to work around this technological limitation is part of the fun, because you get a very enjoyable push and pull of closeness vs. disconnection between each character.

this is great for alienating ash, the only one who doesn't live in the apartments (except for neil), and causing her internal conflict about her relationships with the rest of her friends, especially as the story progresses and they start discovering more shit about the cult, and her instincts are to call the cops because she's a lot more normal than her friends are. or, it's good for alienating travis, who also doesn't live there and is far more isolated than everyone else (more on that next), or for creating an unhealthy and codependent relationship between sal and larry, who, with the walkies, are the only two in the friend group who DO have semi-instant access to each other all the time--all of which are plot points i put into my writing.

and if that's not enough, think about the implications for travis's character in particular. his father is a preacher, and a huge talking point of christian extremists in the 90s was that things like television were evil and demonic in some way. they campaigned against these things heavily. with the kind of person that we know kenneth phelps to be and the way many technologies we take for granted today, including TVs, were still being adopted by older generations, it's not out of the question at all that travis doesn't own something like a TV or a VCR, putting him even more out of the loop with what other people his age are doing than he already would be, having approximately 0 friends. he doesn't know what DND is, and he doesn't know how to look it up because he's not familiar with computers or the internet, he just knows his dad thinks it's demonic, so he steers clear of it.

the intention of cult leaders like kenneth is to keep their victims as isolated as possible, and not owning a TV, VCR, home computer, etc, is a great way to keep travis and his sisters isolated and disconnected from their peers, and therefore more connected to the cult, and it's a lot easier to justify not owning these things in the 90s, where the story already takes place, than it is if you're writing a modern au. a modern au for this situation would require all kinds of technological workarounds to make sure that travis owned a phone but couldn't do anything his father didn't want him doing on it. he's the kind of father who would go through and monitor his kid's texts, he wouldn't just let travis have snapchat or whatever, but i digress.

i know i'm just doing my petty bitching and people can do whatever they want however they want to, but i really do feel like there's a huge piece of the story that is lost in turning the sally face story as it is into some kind of modern au, and it's pretty unfortunate to me that people seem to think that the 90s was such a primitive alien world of incomprehensible technology that they don't want to write for that time period at all. it's really not as terrifying as it seems, genuinely. a surface level understanding of the era's technologies would be straightforward enough for anyone who wasn't there to write something perfectly coherent, if lacking in specific cultural/technological details that nobody but me cares about because i have autism.

if you're a sally face fan reading this and you struggle with writing for the american 90s because you weren't there, go look up pagers (also called beepers) and PDAs (which are basically early pocket computers) and how they work. ask older family members if or how they used them. go look at the different kinds of home computers of the era from companies like packard-bell and IBM. learn what a pentium III is/was, or what it means to be X86 compatible. look at the history of the CD-ROM, and how when it was invented, it could contain so much data that consumers had absolutely no idea what to do with them until people started putting video games on them. go watch cathode ray dude, LGR or techmoan on youtube.

go learn things about this era, it's good for you and you will have a lot of fun, even if you're not like me, i promise, and your fanfiction will be better for it. please learn about this era. take my hand. we can go to beautiful places together.

[plusultraetc]

the way I just realized star wars au erasermic are very wait for me from hadestown but then again when aren’t they

[huginsmemory]

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