Rolling Death Of Physical Media

i didn't say that prime is ALL bad. just underwhelming given the fact that its owned by the richest person in the galaxy. its also the only streamer that gives me problems tech-wise.

i have to remind myself that there is a movie on shudder that my brother-in-law edited and that i haven't seen but i really don't like mosquitos...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1y_vcmRuI4

is everything on freevee on prime? i always think of them as separate things.

Freevee stuff is featured on the Prime mainpage (it's collapsed into your membership), and--if IMDB is to be believed--there are some films & shows featured on both sites. Freevee has its own website but most of their content (bar some of their channels, I think?) is accessible via Prime. There are some MGM movies that constantly bounce between Prime, Freevee, and MGM+ (talk about a useless streamer!).

featured on both sites SIMULTANEOUSLY, that is.

okay, yeah, i guess i just think of freevee as its own thing like tubi. they do feature things that you don't see elsewhere. i'll betcha different people run freevee. prime itself though i never need to see anything on it.

you don't even need to be a prime member to watch freevee on its own. hence the name.

last time I got a free trial of Prime, anything I actually wanted to watch you had to pay extra for, seemed really shit tbh

I cancelled Netflix after they removed the Basic package. that was the only streaming service I had, most of it just seems like a waste of time, if I want to watch something (which isn't that often tbf) I'll just torrent it, fuck em

I appreciate the Dr Who channel on Pluto

I didn't watch anything on Prime for quite awhile, but they have the Expanse and Fallout and the Boys at least.

i think i get every dr. who on britbox. i attempted to start at the beginning at one point - maybe during the pandemic - and didn't get far. i left them with the cavemen and daleks. that show is always kinda frightening to me. like a bad dream.

yeah!! Garishly nightmarish in a good deep way, I’ve just been watching them in the semi-random order they broadcast them in

Sapphire & Steel is on Tubi, any other Americans looking for weird 80s British stuff

are books physical media? I buy a lot of books, they seem to be doing just fine

I buy books for a living, and none of them are physical

Tubi is vastly overrated for movies if you have Kanopy.

"Sapphire & Steel is on Tubi, any other Americans looking for weird 80s British stuff"

i actually own the dvd set! which is a weird thing to own.

i have never read an e-book. or i-book. or digi-book or whatever. i have never listened to a book either. on tape or cd or computer. i'm old-fashioned that way.

Tubi is vastly overrated for movies if you have Kanopy.

How many Bruce Li and Bruce Leh movies are on Kanopy?

i started listening to a cd version of a book about how IBM helped the nazis once. didn't get far. it was boring to sit there and listen. i think i made it through half of one disc. and there were a lot of discs. that was my one experiment in audiobooks. oh and i did listen to about half an hour of anne heche's book once on cassette. that thing was fucking bonkers.

tubi rules. i looked at kanopy once. eh. not that exciting. i don't own a library card. i think it caters to library card people.

probably a lot of barbara kingsolver adaptations on kanopy.

(is that insane that that is the first person i think of when i think of library cards...)

My mom listens to books in her car. I can't imagine doing that; it would drive me nuts. I can't read books on a screen either — I have a bunch of ebooks on my laptop but every time I so much as open one I feel like taking a nap after half a page.

3 Bruce Li movies on Kanopy, no Bruce Leh. Lots and lots of genre films though. I was watching Italian police thrillers on there for a while.s

Cool, 70's Italian police thrillers perhaps my favourite genre that doesn't actually have that many capital G Great movies. The clothes, the soundtracks, the action, the politics...can't get enough of it.

Currently near the top of my Kanopy queue: a 1976 Canadian exploitation movie called East End Hustle; Alan Rudolph’s Trouble in Mind; movies by Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, and Hong Sang-Soo; Frederick Wiseman’s Near Death; Prince of the City; the Brother From Another Planet; Death Laid an Egg; lots more.

https://tubitv.com/search/italian%20crime

Granted, availability may vary greatly depending on your library.

I started listening to audiobooks in the 80s. They fucking rock.

You have to speed them up though. Those actors read too slow.

Can you recommend some 70s Italian crime pictures?

Milano Calibro 9 is my pick for actual greatest - gritty crime thriller with a strong leftist ideology. Street Law is kinda the opposite - right wing vigilante film, tho not dumb as these things go, with a crazy prog-funk soundtrack and delightfully ott Franco Nero.

Thanks!

My neighborhood Barnes & Noble had to close last summer when they got outbid on their lease renewal. Surprisingly, in a few days they're actually reopening in what looks like a smaller, new location and I'm a little anxious about how stocked they're going to be, particularly in the music/movie department.

It's wild that they're actually reopening. Nobody does that anymore!

CGMC, this happened to my local B&N a year or so ago. They moved - I kid you not - maybe 50-75 yards to a smaller location.

(The old location is now some sort of ridiculous gaudy chain jewelry emporium.)

Downside: much, much less in the way of DVDs, Blu-Rays, and music.

My B&N got pushed out of its location by an Amazon store that ended up never opening. It did not reopen.

When my B&N did the same thing (pushed out of old space, moved into another) - the changes to the non-book media was depressing overall. The Blu-Ray/DVD section was reduced to one single six foot wide row of shelves, crammed in a corner. Same thing for the CDs. The CD section is obnoxious as all get out because they also made the baffling decision to store them all with just the spine out, making it an exercise in a sore neck to try to read titles. I gave up. At first it appeared that the vinyl section got significantly larger, but on closer inspection that wasn't really the case. They gave it prominent wall space and spread it out quite a bit, but the racks are much shallower and I'm convinced they actually cut the stock in about half.

We just got a B&N that wasn't here before a few months ago. As everyone else has described, the non-book selection is weak as hell, poorly laid out, and generally worthless. They devote way more space to toys and games than to DVDs, Blu-Rays, CDs and LPs. They have almost no art books, but a gigantic religious section. I've only been there once but they gave me no reason to return, not when there are several independent bookstores in town too.

it feels like a golden age for used CDs, I can buy 8-10 albums for about $40-50 and no guessing about audio quality like with vinyl... I can check online to see how the mastering is in a minute. same for blu-ray, honestly. so much good stuff on the shelves for $7-9.

I only go to the Tupelo B&N twice a year, for the Criterion sales -- I want to give the brick+mortar store first shot before I shop online. The CC section is given less and less space each time.

Austin still has five B&Ns... cafe, lego, and puzzles are probably reliable profit centers that make their position less tenuous than it seems.

There are 10 in the Houston metro area, but only four of them are within the city limits (and half of those are practically in the suburbs).

I envy those of you who live close to a good record store. We haven’t had one in this immediate area in a long time. (Baltimore does, but that’s a bit of a drive.)

We do have a great independent bookstore a few miles away, though.

the B&N stores here are blehhh. huge and boring. MID as the kids would say. their fiction/lit sections suck so bad. same with their SF sections. but there are awesome bookstores around here so no real reason to go to those places. awesome for me anyway. Grey Matter Books in Hadley rules. Author Kelly Link has the awesome and impeccably curated Book Moon Bookstore in Easthampton. the newly opened Unnameable Books in Turners Falls. He has a shop in Brooklyn as well. Great for hipster new stuff. i don't look for new records. a good new DVD selection outside of B&N would be more challenging to find. Maybe Newbury Comics in Northampton but i haven't been there in years. i had a good hookup for DVDs for a long time. now i just have to watch them all. my best friend from high school has a website devoted to horror movies and he told me that he had been collecting VHS and DVD his whole life and now he was just going to watch them all! that's how i feel. but i understand the criterion/niche addiction.

Grey Matter is the best used bookstore in North America

if I lived in that part of the world i would be in there every day

Being in SF, I have reasonably good choices around re book and record stores so not complaining here (and yes to used CD scarfing up and not worrying about sound quality as compared to vinyl -- which was the whole point to start with!).

Building on Scott's point in re streaming options, besides getting Kanopy via my (academic) employer, I subscribe to a LOT of them, but nearly all of them on a yearly basis with renewals spaced throughout the year so that way it doesn't feel like I'm being nickel and dimed (a psychological move obv, but there's also light discounts going that route; basically everything is something I pay for via my freelance writing so it all works out). The exceptions to going yearly would be Netflix and Disney+/Hulu and I absolutely would go yearly on those if I could. I think strictly speaking I can with the Disney/Hulu bundle but I would have to get ads annnnnnnd no. (Everywhere possible I kill out ads, and that's probably why I don't do Tubi or the like as much, though I'm glad they're there.) YouTube Premium I need to finally go yearly on here soon, Max I get for free almost as a legacy from the AT&T days (they're my cell provider) and Peacock I get on a reduced rate due to Comcast handling my Internet, I pay more to get rid of the ads as noted. Beyond that, offhand: Criterion, MUBI and Kino for the cinephile itch, then Apple+, Paramount+/Showtime, Prime, Britbox, AMC+, Starz, Nebula plus the bespoke WOW Presents Plus, MST3K and Rifftrax apps. Do I watch everything on them? Of course not! But nine times out of ten it means if something is recommended I have access, and in a handy turn of events, almost everything I care about in terms of sports (cycling, soccer/football, the Olympics in general) is picked up one way or another by the services I already have. Won't complain.

The Barnes & Noble in downtown Seattle was replaced by three empty floors for three years, then a pop-up Friends merch store, then empty floors for a year, then a pop-up Stranger Things merch store. (There’s one about 50 minutes away, but it sucks, and half that travel time is walking through three parking lots for a former shopping mall that is now partially something ice hockey.)

and didn't get far. i left them with the cavemen and daleks

Cavemen are episodes 2-4, daleks are eps 6-11. You couldn’t have made it much further anyway, as eps 14-20 (with Marco Polo) are missing, but 12-13 is a good little spooky locked-room spaceship mystery.

Tubi is vastly overrated for movies if you have Kanopy.

Most libraries only allow patrons about five movies or episodes or shorts a months on Kanopy, aiui.

(Ours has recently changed from a flat five to some kind of impenetrable metered credit system.)

Seeing that list of streaming subscriptions Ned posted makes my head hurt.

I'm one of the laziest streaming subscribers you imagine. I have Prime because I signed on for the Prime shipping plan like 10 years ago. I have Netflix because I signed on for the disc service 18 years ago. The Hulu I have I got through Spotify when I upgraded to Premium five years ago. I'm only on Max now because my best friend & her husband added me as a fourth on their account they get through their cable provider. In alot of ways this is more than enough for me. It's surprising how quickly a lot of content round robins between those four companies.

I've meant to sign on to Criterion and/Mubi, but it seems like I never have the funds available when they offer their best deals (probably because of all my other streaming expenses lol).

I have Kanopy through my library, and Hulu and Netflix because a friend offered the hookup. Beyond that, well, there’s cable, library DVDs, and the movie theater. It means I don’t see everything, but there’s so much available to see!

(And my relatively small personal DVD library.)

Unnameable Books in Turners Falls. He has a shop in Brooklyn as well

Funny, this is probably my least favorite shop and it's so close to me. It's a damn shame. The staff aren't exactly rude, but not friendly or helpful like so many other local booksellers are. And they're one of those stores that treats it;'s genre fiction sections like dumping grounds. Anything of arbitrary literary quality will be filed in LITERATURE (i.e. Simenon, Chandler) while they leave the mystery section to airport thrillers and things they consider uhhhh.. lesser. Really no other way for me to read it tbh. I think a lot of stores sometimes mistakenly file a crime novel in general fiction, or a post-apocalyptic SF novel, but it seems like almost like a policy w/ these guys. They DO have decent new books on music and some other stuff, but their new book section is equally geared toward the highbrow. Sad for me, but the new location of Better Read Than Dead will be open soon enough and that's also close to me, hurray for nice booksellers.

hey I remember 5 1/2" floppys ;)

when I started on computers, you saved the files to audio tape (TRS-80)

the real big floppys were before my time, I think they were 8"?

I remember playing computer programs in my Walkman because I lacked access to Japanese noise records.

lol I can't tell if you are being sarcastic or not, but that is def harsh noise

Absolutely true. And yeah, extremely harsh. Sometimes it would shift very suddenly from stereo to just one speaker and it was like getting punched in the head.

<3

those reviews in like Bananafish used to drive me crazy, ecstatic praise for things that turned out to be acetates in editions of 50

I remember glenn mcdonald's generic Aube review template specified that, back in the furia days.

https://www.furia.com/page.cgi?type=twas&id=twas0097

The trick is this: you can invent a literally unlimited number of fictional Aube albums which you can claim to own and adore, driving the fan you'll never meet insane with envy. For each one, you need only to fill out the following form: "It's called (combine any two whole or partial words having to do with industry or math). It's a limited edition of (pick a number from 500 to 1500), on some label called (pick another word or two involving industry or esoteric superstitions) from (pick any country where public buildings have fluorescent lighting and climate control). Everything on it was made from only the sound of a (pick any object, no matter how innocuous or mute). It's deliriously difficult to listen to, and thus totally cool."
Allow me to demonstrate: "It's called Magnetostriction. It's a limited edition of 777, on some label called God Factory from Holland. Everything on it was made from only the sound of a magnetic resonance spectroscope. It's deliriously difficult to listen to, and thus totally cool." You see? Unless you are able to locate one of the 776 other copies of this disc, you will have no way of knowing whether this album is real or something I invented to amuse myself.

pfft limited to 77 or gtfo ;)

I actually just bought an Aube tape a couple weeks back, one of RRR's "Recycled Music" series where they are dubbed onto cutout bin factory tapes from major labels

#onethread

no overwrought promo copy for this tape, kudos to RRR

Sounds of the Dawn YouTube channel - I maerval at the idea of collecting to many rare cassettes in real form of tape

I saw a teenager buying CDs at B&N yesterday.

I often wonder which of these rare tapes on YouTube are real and which are some retro new recordings.

its a real concern Chris. I wonder if discogs is a source of truth 3098709387